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Carl

For those here to learn about me …

I'm a technically savvy software professional with hands-on experience in aspects of software processes from design to programming to sales … and nearly everything in between. My most current expertise is as a project manager and business analyst. The customer is my passion and my expertise.

I particularly enjoy training and education, where my heart found its home working for Allen Communication. I love the visual aspects of software, and training is one of the best mediums. I like giving software users, of any kind, a wonderful experience. One of my favorite things is working with customers to determine their needs and then to communicate the design and requirements to developers. I'm a great technical and marketing material writer. I like to "get dirty" in the labors of pleasing customers.

Professional Background

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Professional Skills Overview

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Here's a bit of background:
At Verisk Health over the past four+ years I've been a project manager working in agile environments, I'm scrum master certified, and over the past half year added to that the responsibility of business analyst because of my system knowledge. I've been documenting our processes and gathering the technical system knowledge from developers. My pride has been a collection of "how-to's," including SQL and steps to resolve the common issues of our development team, now found in our wiki that I created when I was first hired, and used by the various teams of the company, but a key knowledge repository for our R&D team.

I have excellent technical knowledge of computer and software systems, and much experience working with people.

And for fun, a story of my recent experience:

We'd been using scrum or some form of agile on our half-dozen development teams. In December 2013 we all went to week-long scrum training. On the last day Mr. Winters described kanban. "Kanban?" His description was interesting. Questions followed. "You know what?" I thought. "This could work with the four teams I project-manage." Each team took work from our dozen internal client groups, and each task they gave us took from minutes to a day or two to complete. Seemed like a good fit.

Hmm. But the version of our work tracking tool, TFS (Team Foundation Server), didn't support kanban directly. "Could I make this work?" I was too excited to not try.

I had come a few years earlier from a vibrant startup, aVinci. They hired entrepreneurs. It was refreshing. Each of us wore many hats � some of our own choosing! I was used to looking outside my box, so I grabbed a passionate developer and within a couple days, being too impatient to wait for a new version of TFS, devised a workaround and presented it to two of the teams. "Yes!" they said. The next weeks we honed and chopped and sutured � and partied all the way.

Well � "there's nothing more permanent than a temporary fix," and "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," so a year and a half later all four teams still use (and refine) my "makeshift" kanban process. And we still celebrate each month with a team potluck.

And our clients love it. I'd been a trainer and support team lead in a previous life, so taught our internal clients how to gain visibility into our dev team work without bothering our developers every day. They "won" and the dev teams "won."

And you know what? Since the development teams were now self-running (well, almost), I used my saved time to work with our clients to create better-defined, templatized work requests. They now bother the developers less, they're happier, and they focus more on their external clients rather than keeping our dev teams on track. And the wiki I'd created when I was first hired became the repository for our process knowledge, the client work templates, and the background knowledge the dev team needed to perform each task.

It's been a joyful ride.

Some of My Positions

Books I Recommend

I'm an avid reader of good business books. My brother, a successful software business owner, and I are always sharing our favorites. Here are some better ones I recommend. Of these I particularly recommend The Slight Edge for starters, then Tribal Leadership. Oh, I don't know, maybe Curcial Conversations should be at the top. Anyway, take your pick. (Perhaps someday I'll create a blog on my thoughts on these books. Several have changed how I think about work and lifek, and even how I live.)

Web Sites I Maintain for Fun (and Friends)

Some Projects I've Worked On

Technical Writing & Training Samples
(Some links below are in need of fixing—will you get on that, please!)