Career Summary

Forty years of experience in the Information Technology industry.
Well-rounded professional with extensive skills in:

  • Unisys Libra/MCP Mainframe Technology (~thirty years)
  • Remedy ARS Software Development (~twelve years)
  • Software Development Life Cycle: Incremental, RAD, Agile
  • Application Programming & User Interface Design
  • Software Development Rough Order of Magnitude Estimation
  • Business Requirements Gathering & Analysis
  • Project Team Leadership (nine years)
  • Functional Specification Writing & Use Case Creation
  • Database Design & Administration
  • Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL)
  • Mainframe Technical Support & Administration

Professional Experience:

08/2019 to Present                 Senior Mainframe Application Developer – – The Clearing House

  • Initially hired to develop a formal week-long training class, to teach the Unisys MCP mainframe ALGOL programming language. This forty hour training class with ten students was professionally video-taped & uploaded to Udemy.
  • Responsible for the formal training of college graduate new-hires as well as experienced COBOL programmers, teaching them how to develop and write efficient (& readable) code using ALGOL.
  • Responsible for developing & maintaining two mission critical Unisys MCP mainframe applications, mainly using ALGOL, and some COBOL.
  • Responsible for DASDL (and related DMSII tailored software) compiles, database reorgs, as well as DMSII release upgrades (upgraded ~30 DMSII databases from DMSII 58.1 to 60.1).
  • Member of six month development effort, adding a major enhancement to one of two mission-critical applications. Responsible for creating 12 new screens; the logic to edit those screens; and the updating of various DMSII datasets, etc. This individual effort resulted in 7,000 lines of new ALGOL code for the existing screen-based program, along with 3k lines of ALGOL code for a new stand-alone batch program.
  • Designed & developed stand-alone 7,000 line ALGOL program to process (and send) updates to an outside third-party, when a specific outside critical event occurs.
  • Member of six month effort to document existing ALGOL & COBOL programs by adding information into a new Master Data Dictionary; relating ~400 source programs to their respective DMSII Databases, Datasets, & Dataset Fields; indicating the Dataset(s) being created, updated, and/or deleted by each program, as well as, the exact Dataset fields that are being read from, or written to, etc.
  • Informally training inexperienced MCP mainframe programmers on the coding of WFL (job control language) jobs, DMSII (database), & other MCP related system/environmental software tools, such as CANDE, EDITOR, Programmer’s Workbench, DMINQ, ERGO, Log Analyzer, etc.
  • Successfully using Agile methodology.

08/2016 to 07/2019                 Senior ITSM Application Engineer — Thrivent Financial

  • Member of team initially hired to enhance and support ITSM8 applications using Remedy 8.1 Developer Studio.
  • Supported BMC Remedy ARS 9.1 ITSM suite of ITIL applications (Incident/Change), including CMDB Asset/CI configuration, as well as upgrading ADDM to new support releases on a quarterly basis.
  • Configuration/creation/enhancement of Atrium Integrator (Pentaho) ETL Transformations & Jobs.
  • Member of four person team that successfully upgraded ITSM 8.1 to 9.1 (“in place”)
  • Developed database forms and workflow enhancements to Incident, Change & Asset modules of ITSM.
  • Led two person team that successfully installed the BMC Remedy Smart Reporting product, in all three datacenter environments (Development, System Test, and Production).
  • Developed enhancements (and bug fixing) to Kinetic Request (“RE” version) applications, including Kinetic Task (v4.0) trees, handlers, etc.
  • Six years total experience with ITSM

10/2014 to 12/2015                Educational Sabbatical — Master of Software Systems

  • Completed the requirements for Master in Software Systems at University of Saint Thomas.
  • Concentration: Business & Systems Analysis.
  • Coursework included:
    • IT Infrastructure (Dev/Ops)
    • Software Analysis and Design (UML)
    • Requirements Analysis
    • Database Modeling & Design (PowerDesigner)
    • Process Management (Agile)
    • User Interface Experience (UX)
    • Web Development & Design (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, etc.)
    • Systems Analysis Design Tools
    • Software Engineering
    • Technical Communication

12/2011 to 09/2014                Remedy/ITSM Developer Specialist — U.S. Postal Service

  • Member of team enhancing and supporting ITSM7 Incident Management application using Remedy 7.6.4 Developer
    Studio.
  • Enhanced Incident Management application with “Parts Ordering” module for Post Office Branches to order 3rd party parts for broken Point Of Sale / Automated Postal Center equipment.
  • Three years of experience with ITSM7.

09/2011 to 12/2011               Remedy Developer Specialist — Century Link

  • Helped develop a custom order entry application using Remedy 7.6.4 Developer Studio. Designed and created
    numerous forms, as well as developed and tested more than two hundred active links and filters.

03/2010 to 08/2011               Senior Change Management Coordinator — Wells Fargo

  • Reviewed, audited, and approved an average of six hundred Change Requests per month, ensuring compliance with Enterprise Technology Change Management requirements.
  • Coordinated datacenter infrastructure related changes to mitigate risk when implementations overlapped each other.
  • Suggested twenty one enhancements to the Change Management application; twelve of which were accepted and implemented.

07/2009 to 02/2010               Position search — due to 10% reduction at Unisys

04/2007 to 06/2009               Project Leader – Remedy Support — Unisys

10/2004 to 03/2007               Developer Specialist – Remedy Support — Unisys

  • Co-designed and co-developed a custom built ITIL based Change Management application using Remedy ARS 7.0.
    The application served more than a thousand datacenter technical support personnel, tracking all changes to the
    ~10,000 hardware servers supported in the company’s premier outsourcing datacenter. 75,000 Changes were captured
    in its first three years of operation. Created several hundred active links, filters and escalations.
  • Enhanced and maintained in-house built Incident Management application using Remedy ARS 7.0 by adding new
    features on a bi-monthly development/release cycle, as well as troubleshooting and fixing numerous bugs. Created
    or modified hundreds of active links/filters, and dozens of forms. Supported various interfaces to custom built
    “Asset Management” database, as well as to email and pager alert systems.
  • Received two Unisys “Silver” achievement awards for rapid implementation of three critical enhancement requests:
    1. Restricting offshore support resources from accessing Incidents & Changes when constrained by the client to the use
    of onshore only resources;
    2. The implementation of 4th / 5th tier Incident escalation notifications;
    3. And lastly, the creation of a new “Crisis Notification” mechanism.
  • Co-initiated and co-instituted a new process of bi-monthly scheduled “Remedy Enhancement” releases, along with
    the creation of preliminary & final release announcements as well as creation and dissemination of training materials.
  • Upgraded ARS Server Production (and Development) environments from 5.x to 6.0, 6.0 to 6.3, 6.3 to 7.0.

10/2001 to 09/2004               Developer Specialist – Mainframe — Unisys

  • Designed and developed a datacenter application and database that creates server specific parameter files for three
    utility programs servicing more than twenty mainframe servers. This project involved the creation of more than thirty
    screens and 28,000 lines of code, eliminating the need to manually modify more than sixty individual parameter files.
  • Designed and developed a datacenter application monitoring processor utilization on mainframe servers. The
    monitor allowed each server to achieve maximum throughput and eliminated processor thrashing.
  • Designed and developed an application and database to store and track more than sixty unique attributes for each
    of the ~1,000 production and test databases supported. This effort led to the creation of numerous generic workflows
    used for database generation, recovery, or repair, retrieving database specific attributes from this new database.

04/1997 to 09/2001               Project Leader, Technical Systems Support — Unisys
07/1993 to 03/1997               Project Leader, Database Administration — Unisys

  • Planned and directed three major MCP Operating System software upgrades, involving ~25 mainframe servers.
  • Planned and directed three major DMSII software releases, involving ~500 DMSII compiles/gens for each release.
  • Planned, directed and developed the implementation of an innovative solution allowing multiple levels of DMSII
    to reside on the same mainframe server. This effort eliminated the requirement of a simultaneous upgrade of
    all databases on a server. Team received Unisys “Gold” achievement award for this effort.

Leadership Experience

  • Nine years’ experience as a Project/Team Lead.
  • Project Leader of five Remedy Developer/Administrators, supported internally developed Remedy based Incident
    and Change Management applications used by ~1000 end users within the company’s premier outsourcing data
    center. Supervision of three Off-Shore team members. Responsibilities included: Day to day administration and
    support of three Remedy applications (including base foundation tables), reviewing/prioritizing new enhancement
    requests, bug troubleshooting/resolution, creating pre & post release announcements, as well as developing training
    materials for each bi-monthly application release.
  • Project Leader of eight Technical Support Analysts, supported more than thirty MCP/Clear Path mainframe servers.
  • Project Leader of five Database Administrators, supported 500+ production DMSII databases on mainframe servers.
  • Developed curriculum and taught numerous classes in Database Concepts, Work Flow Language (“JCL”), as well as
    Programming Concepts for junior technical and non-technical members of the data center.

Formal Education and Professional Development:

  • 2015 Master of Software Systems                                                        University of Saint Thomas, Saint Paul, MN
  • 1987  Bachelor of Science in Information Systems                             University of Redlands, Redlands, CA
    —————————————————————————————————————————————————–
  • 2010  JAVA Object Oriented Programming Certificate                        Normandale College, Edina, MN
  • 2007  Effective Team Leadership                                                           Unisys
  • 2005  ITIL Foundations                                                                           Unisys
  • 2004  Remedy Administration and Development                                BMC Software
  • 2000  Client/Server Technology Certificate                                          University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN
    [Visual Basic, PowerBuilder, SQL Server, Oracle]
  • 1995  Foundations of Leadership                                                         Unisys
  • 1993  Mini-Masters in Software Design & Development                   University of Saint Thomas, Saint Paul, MN

 
Client/Server Tools Expertise: BMC Remedy ARS 8.1, 7.6, 7.0, 6.3, MS SQL Server 200x, Oracle 11g
BMC Remedy Tools Expertise: Developer Studio, Migrator, Admin tool, Data Import tool, Developer Plus
Unisys Mainframe Expertise: ALGOL, COBOL, DMSII, COMS, DASDL, WFL, CANDE [Clear Path MCP/Libra/NX/A-Series]

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