ARTHUR HAYS

Operations Management - Business Process Improvement - Complex Problem Solving

Servant leader who facilitates strategic process engineering and quality to enable successful organizations.

STRATEGIC TECHNICAL PROJECT MANAGER - with 20+ years’ experience in process improvement and value streaming; effective liaison across functions to ensure efficiency and deliver extraordinary quality outcomes. A results driven leader with a strong background in operations and supply chain management. Recognized for collaborative leadership style, proactive, approach, and keen ability to effectively translate complex operational concepts into tangible action plans. Proactive project manager with strong interpersonal skills able to adapt and provide value in fast-paced agile environments. A proven communication skills leader who blends big-picture viewpoints with tactical considerations to influence, inspire, and build trust.

• Collaborated with external partners and business development, technical, marketing, social, QA, Merchandising and many other internal teams to drive the release production effort ensuring consistency, agile and effective high-quality outcomes. Lead Learning Management System adoption and migration initiatives. Working with cross functional teams within the organization as well as external vendors to create an improved customer LMS experience.

CROSS-FUNCTIONAL COMMUNICATION

• Liaison between divisions providing micro-steps - of existing release engineering process to those divisions in terms that could be easily understood and followed; reducing cycle time by 30%.
• Partnered with multiple development managers using Jira - requesting top priority for their projects within the same release cycle. Presented priority criteria requirements that enabled development managers to identify where their projects land within the priority levels.
• Managed multi-divisional virtual team of key stakeholders - (Contracts, Technical Support, Marketing, Development, Distribution and Customer Consultants) for internal software product processing and testing.

PROCESS ENGINEERING

• Reduced cycle time of draft to production documentation updates - for pricing and packaging division. Using Microsoft excel macros, cycle time to update internal markup of documentation to external customer facing versions improved from 40 minutes per document to less than one.
• Created and managed a repeatable internal software project process - including all departments and divisions involved with external customer order processing and allowed cycles for resolution prior to release and sales to external customer.
• Worked within a 3-week product release cycle - communicating real-time project usability adjustments during cycle to accommodate updated requirements by customers, developers and market.
• Partnered with individuals and divisions to present release pipeline applications - and other product roadmap resources available for overall project processing focus.

PROJECT MANAGEMENT

• Final phase software review - to verify compatibility with existing production software. Provided product testing scenarios to technical support division to confirm product development meets project vision and objectives defined in kick-off meeting.
• Guided software projects through release pipeline - as a Release Engineering Project Manager by using tools such as Jira, MS Projects, Sharepoint and Teams for collaborative engagement with team members to complete tasks on time and on budget. Average release cycle is 3-weeks and contained 25-40 projects; of which I handled 6-10. Most project management tasks were related to single software Products or software Solutions (group of products) every 3-weeks.
• Handled project prioritization - within the 3-week release cycle. In Scrum Master role, design and introduced a mini-cycle priority criteria process breaking the projects into manageable groups.
• Regularly met with key stakeholders from various departments - for project kick-off strategies every 3-weeks related to the health of new or updated product charters.

STRATEGIC ANALYSIS

• Identified project obstacles through retrospective gap analysis – and made improvement suggestions aligned with current best practices. Introduced project milestone status sign-off matrix as a successful result of retrospective gap analysis. The matrix improved project efficiency and accuracy an average of 20% during a release cycle.
• Participated in retrospect gap analysis groups - to review quality planning and control of software products. Resulted in quality improvements with project processes, product testing and language translations for international documentation.
• Analyzed projects within release cycles - and worked with teams of multi-divisional individuals using Jira to determine needed internal testing scenarios and address identified risks within a release cycle.
• Evaluated work related to time/cycle expense rather than monetary - Determined how many cycles were needed for projects and the cost related to the time expense. Analyzed the expense taken away from one project during Project Prioritization so others could move forward.