User:Robfalla

Rob Falla

Solutions Architect

Skills summary

General Management • Stakeholder Management • Line Management • Project Management • Requirements Analyst • Business Analyst • Scrum • UML • Documentation • Technical • Agile • Product Owner • ScrumMaster • Delivery Driven • Guided by KPIs • ROI Focused • Customer Experience Champion • Social Networking • Community Development • Community Engagement

Profile

Delivery: Proven track record delivering information products and portals, web portals, social networking strategies and standalone software on time and on budget.

Leadership: I expect my team to behave in a professional manner at all times and to always give 100% to any task they take on. I use a combination of mentoring and coaching to help support and develop team members. By getting to know and understand each member of the team I am also better able to anticipate and remove any potential issues to team performance and delivery.

Management: Strategy drives tactics and through the use of business intelligence and analysis tools such as the Boston box, Porters five forces and the Pestle model I am able to quickly and accurately define and plan strategically relevant tactics and an implementation plan to see the strategy realised.

Expertise: Industry leader in information portal and community engagement development using social networking and other services. In addition to conducting workshops and training events I have spoken at business and trade seminars and conferences. I was invited to speak at the WUA in California in 2011 and am scheduled to speak at the UX UAP in January 2012.

Skilled and experienced in both Waterfall (APM Certified) and Agile (ScrumMaster & Product Owner) development methodologies, and am comfortable working in either or in a hybrid organisation.

Workshops, conferences, seminars – Highlights

• Panellist at the UX Design and Online Communities seminar – January 2012, London
• Presented “Facebook for business success” Ely based business club – January 2012, Ely, Cambs
• Delivered a keynote speech on Social networking at the Chambers of Commerce – Cambridge, UK, 2011
• Presented social networking seminar in Huntingdon, Cambridge and Ely.
• Delivered several social networking training sessions for small business owners in Cambridgeshire
• Conducted Nokia planning workshops with internal and external stakeholders - London, Cambridge, Paris, Bangalore, Helsinki (2009 – 2011)
• Presented to Nokia Board in 2009 and 2010
• Presented at Symbian Foundation developers conference in 2009
• Planned and organised Symbian developers workshop, delivered
• Conducted user focus group for Symbian developers (3rd party software engineers) (2003 and 2008)
• Presentation to an investment bank in London for spinout funding for XMS – London, June 2002
• Speaker - Documentation, why it matters to everyone – Heidelberg, November 2000

Experience

Your Presence Online Ltd | www.yourpresenceonline.com

Cambridge, UK

Information Solutions Architect

(06/10 – present)

Responsible for creating and managing clients’ internet marketing campaigns in an Agile environment using social media dashboards such as Hootsuite. Responsible for client management: reputation monitoring, defining and implementing strategic engagement campaign and reporting on meaningful measureable metrics. Work with LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, SlideShare, Blogging, YouTube, and many others.

Key Achievements:

• Promoted a new “in Facebook” game via Facebook and Twitter. Viral uplift saw daily new user signup increase by 5000% in the first few days alone. The campaign achieved overall user growth of 1300%. (~50 users at the start).
• Developed and implemented a crowd-sourced testing solution. The community of users provide feedback on game play which is passed directly to the development team who implement the fix and upgrade. The users see the results of their efforts within a day. The improved community engagement also lead to increased use per player and more positive mentions and shares, which lead to more new users who were more engaged.
• Successfully delivered fully integrated social networking, website and e-mail marketing campaigns for several clients.
• Defined and implemented overall business strategy, line and project management, training, business development, networking and marketing.
• Defined an innovative approach to social networking that supports various business activities including marketing, customer service and support, recruitment and education.
• Presented at industry events and tradeshows.
• Conducted social media workshops and training events.

Nokia | www.nokia.com

Cambridge/London, UK/Bangalore, IN/Helsinki, FI (continuation from Symbian)

Product Owner

(02/09 – 03/11)

We delivered the final increment of the Symbian Developer library (Overviews, Guides, Tutorials, API documentation and worked examples). I built a medium sized team of talented authors (16) and testers / software engineers (3) using internal transfers and new hires. I was responsible for all aspects of candidate selection. This was an Agile development environment within a largely Waterfall organisation.

Key Achievements:

• Delivered information portal to market. Included consultation with stakeholders throughout the mobile industry including: BroadCom, CSR, Docomo and ST Ericsson (who each provided testimonials to my director). Demonstrated incremental product to internal and external stakeholders at end of each Scrum.
• The finished product included a commenting system and Wiki which allowed the community to contribute organic content.
• Defined a product backlog in consultation with internal and external stakeholders and refined with the internal Agile development team responsible for implementing the backlog.
• Managed distributed Agile development team in UK, Finland, and India.
• Conducted stakeholder workshops and team training events.

Symbian Ltd | www.symbian.com

Cambridge/London, UK /Bangalore, IN

12/02 to 02/09 (several roles)

Delivered an information portal for software engineers creating services and applications that run on Symbian OS. I also successfully conducted a community engagement pilot where we experimented with several approaches to getting feedback from the community.

Product Owner

(12/07 – 02/09)

Key Achievements:

• Delivered the portal to market. Demo to stakeholders at the end of each Agile iteration.
• Defined product backlog. Worked with internal and external stakeholders.
• Managed Agile development team, co-located in Cambridge, London, and Bangalore.

Team Lead / ScrumMaster

(07/06 – 12/07)

• Delivered a new architecture for the information portal.
• Continued to conduct workshops with internal and external stakeholders.
• Developed a two stage demo process, one for internal stakeholders and one for partners and customers.
• During this period the company ended the Agile Pilot and initiated a rolling switch to Agile.
• There were a number of issues with the slow nature of the change to Agile, and it was especially difficult on the teams who remained waterfall within an Agile environment. Delays and setbacks were often seen as a result of the inflexible nature of these waterfall teams.
• The change process would have been improved by swapping waterfall development team members in small numbers into Agile teams at the point where the majority of software engineering had already made the switch. The speed with which team members managed the transition would have been greatly increased. I was given a chance to prove this theory at Nokia.

Team Lead / Requirements Manager

(with Project management responsibilities)

London and Cambridge (10/05 – 06/06)

• Delivered an information portal that included limited community engagement through direct reader feedback.
• Completed my APM certification at the start of this role.
• Conducted workshops for external stakeholders to capture requirements
• Conducted project planning workshops with internal stakeholders to convert customer requirements into actionable project plans.
• Participated in the Agile Development Pilot programme.

This involved six teams across software engineering making the transition to Agile.

• Completed ScrumMaster and Agile team member training
• Conducted workshops with external stakeholders to inform them of the business process and development methodology change. We also reviewed previously agreed requirements and made adjustments to priorities. Agreed an Agile demo schedule.
• Conducted Agile planning workshops with internal stakeholders. Created a product backlog, agreed an internal demo schedule.
• Coached the team through the transition into running the Agile process of iteration planning, iteration kickoff, daily scrum, iteration review and iteration retrospective. We were working in a waterfall environment – a number of unique issues to be handled including:
• Keeping waterfall project managers in the loop and as involved in the Agile planning process as possible where dependencies existed.
• Coaching team members through the change. Several members of the team found the transition from individual contributor to Agile team member difficult. This required short term coaching and one to one support.
• Senior management required the Agile pilot teams to deliver any already committed projects. The development methodology change needed to be managed such that there was no long term negative impact on delivery schedules. I had to meet with senior management on a regular basis to report on the progress of the pilot, of the project, of the teams transition.

Bangalore Operations Team Leader

London, UK / Bangalore, India (11/04 – 09/05)

I was responsible for building a documentation team made up of local technical communicators, testers and software engineers. I interviewed, hired and trained an initial authoring team and mentored and coached a team member to take over the team lead role. Eventually this group grew to include 27 technical communicators, 4 software engineers, two testers and an integration engineer.

• Integrated two offshore development teams into the product development team
• Created and delivered training designed to ease new team members into the department
• Responsible for line and project management during the transition to local leadership

Technology Lead

Cambridge / London, UK(12/02 – 11/04)

• Delivered a limited information portal for personal networking and connectivity developers
• Worked with external software engineers to capture requirements
• Conducted workshops with internal software engineering developers to aide project planning

Xerox Inc | www.xerox.com

Cambridge/London, UK / Syracuse, US

Product Manager

(06/01 – 09/02)

Delivered mDoc 3.0 to market on time and under budget. Duties included: planning and delivering projects, stakeholder engagement, managing a team of 12 software engineers, all with an annual budget of £2,000,000.

Xtempus Ltd | www.xtempus.com

London, UK

Product Owner

(01/01 – 06/01)

Delivered an information portal for mobile applications. The software was a suite of productivity tools for mobile phone manufacturers, operators and users. Duties included line and project management of a 3 person team.

Lion BioScience Ltd | www.lionbioscience.com

Cambridge, UK/Heidelberg, DE/Boston, US

Documentation Manager

(02/99 – 01/01)

Designed and implemented an information and knowledge distribution system. The delivery included a printed documentation set and an interactive information portal for several products. Although I started out in this role as a sole author I was given responsibility to grow and manage a team of four authors and a software engineer. Duties included line and project managing a 5 person team plus stakeholder engagement and management.

Publishing Highlights

Books:

• HTML Style Sheets (CSS) Quick Reference
• Special Edition Using HTML 3.2 2nd Edition
• Special Edition Using HTML 4.0 4th Edition
• Dynamic Web Publishing Unleashed

Magazine articles:

• An Introduction to Data Binding
• Building a Data-Bound Web Page
• The Future of Forms
• Serving the Right Style Sheet
• Dynamic Layering Techniques
• Controlling Layout with Dynamic Positioning
• Dynamic Positioning
• Dynamic Content Replacement
• Replacing Content in NN
• Replacing Content in IE
• Cross-Browser Development
• Review of Edit+
• The Minimalist Approach to Dynamic HTML
• Cross-Browser Events
• More Responsive Order Forms