H.J. Wicko
Program Manager
Summary
Talented professional that brings 20 years of valuable program, project, and portfolio management expertise to forward company objectives. Vision, collaboration, process improvement, and surveillance skills decrease issue length and risk impacts to projects, programs and initiatives to achieve goals. Experienced in goal setting with metrics, reporting, and team building for transparency and communication needs.
Overview
12
12
years of professional experience
6
6
years of post-secondary education
6
6
Certifications
Work History
Delivery Principal
Kin + Carta
10.2021 - 04.2023
- Instituted 52 KPIs across ten Squads and firmwide organizations to monitor checking program progress health to meet third-line, regulatory, senior executive committee needs
- Setup governance processes and tools to obtain master tracker Smartsheet grid updates that automatically refresh Smartsheet dashboard in near real time
- Identified subset of dashboard KPIs to monitor and report on across launch, BAU, and shut down phases
- Installed a multi-team process improvement that revamped a 25+ person, scaled Scrum structure
- Installed a two-week scrum cycle, relative sizing story point values, retros, and demos
- Brought efficiencies to ceremony timing and durations as well as produced a new delivery acceptance process to deliver consistency
- Overhauled client roadmap and weekly reporting for standardized use across program teams and rolled out a standardized program-level reporting deck that combined project roadmaps, delivery health statistics in stoplight and textual format, with a key message section to leadership in an executive summary
- Maintained roadmap and provided weekly updates to stakeholders in weekly progress reporting meetings
- Owned the second line, critical business function – end-to-end risk containment governance process – and transparently advised project leadership of the program's control over risk exposure in alignment with changing client business needs and corporate policies
- Revamped the program-level risk containment process by establishing a council charter, defined and documented governance process breakdowns by role and risk functions, including performance metric trending in dashboards and report, to homogenize end-to-end use
- Authored Northstar statement, developed project benefits list, identified technical components, setup Trello Kanban, defined POC and MVP builds and N.N versions in a release roadmap for new timecard chatbot requirement across a 2,000-person environment
- Established East Region FY '23 Operating Plan on volunteer committee; Steering Committee member and committee head for two programs in '22 America's philanthropic effort; managed four direct-report delivery employees; interviewed Delivery Lead candidates to meet LatAm company growth goal.
Program Manager
NextPlay Technologies
03.2020 - 10.2021
- Portfolio, and Product Delivery, FULLY REMOTE
- Directed, drove, managed, and delivered over 30 B2C and B2B inter-related, strategic, and transform-the-business portfolio product rollouts in the Microsoft Azure Cloud platform that used Azure DevOps infrastructure, that was API-heavy and had multiple third-party integrations, as well as Flutter Android and iOS mobile app development platforms through Agile delivery processes producing revenue-generating products
- Developed and aligned product roadmaps and delivery streams that meet the rapidly accelerating organizational strategic needs, that focused on and quickly pivot to deliver the highest value development components first, according to feature priority, dependency, blockers, and resource constraints
- Carried out responsibility for developing work streams to meet business priorities and deadlines; created and carried out processes and methodologies, resourced to accomplish organizational goals, partnered internally to support effective business decisions, and implementing cross-functional portfolio process improvements
- Orchestrated critical production and deeply integrated changes across multiple product streams to assure delivery meets business needs as Agile and delivery SME for deployment process and organization needs
- Created and continually improved portfolio development and delivery processes with team toolkits that bring out team efficiencies, improve team performance, and provide consistency in delivery mechanics and results
- Beat an annual 37% CapEx budget decrease requirement by 14k and decreased expenses by 17k
- Staffed, organized, managed, and forecasted for global staff and a direct report
- Turned around and delivered the initial rollout version of the Maupintour rewrite project in three sprints that had zero major defects and exceeded organizational expectations with a successful v2 follow-up
- Instituted an organization-wide Agile methodology and product delivery process from a chaotic, reactive, and non-repeatable to-do list backlog pattern into a scheduled, repeatable, and ordered structure
- Stood up Freshdesk support desk instance through requirements, configuration, staffing, training, and rollout.
- Engaged and worked alongside cross-functional stakeholders to manage strategic initiatives.
Project Manager
Royal Caribbean International
Miramar, FL
09.2019 - 12.2019
- Planned and delivered AMOS program objectives within the RCCL environment for a 7M application upgrade with enhancements and a data migration from an Oracle to MS SQL platform, atop newly deployed fleet and shore virtual infrastructure through daily scrum team leadership, budget management, and team coordination.
Senior Project Manager
Blue Cross Blue Shield Of South Carolina
Columbia, SC
09.2017 - 02.2019
- Planned, coordinated, and delivered Agile and SDLS software implementations within the Master Cloud Program; managed cross-group and cross-team staff to verify prioritized portfolio work queues were supporting the achievement of business initiatives by prioritizing the project's business objectives.
Project Manager
INova Hospital
Alexandria, VA
07.2017 - 09.2017
- Drove and achieved iNova Hospital's implementation of their critical finish date for enterprise Epic software upgrade dependencies by replacing 2,000 monitors and completing in-place upgrading firmware on 1,200 production terminals across a six-hospital region team of a 25-member technical staff, six technical leads, and six business relationship managers according to a facility and crucial-floor-prioritized deployment plan.
Senior Project Manager
Fannie Mae
, DC, VA, Remote
05.2013 - 07.2017
- Managed 5M – 7M in annual project budget spread over 40 resources for concurrently running hybrid-Agile and SDLC software projects including enterprise applications requiring data migrations, UI rewrites, COTS products, and custom web development utilizing a mix of vendor and IT support groups in an enterprise PMO
- Decreased project slippage, scope creep, and cost overruns by proactively monitoring and controlling project tasks to detect upstream-downstream impacts as well as other issues using change, risk, and issue protocols
- Delivered a high-risk, high uncertainty, customer facing application re-write project to 2,500 users cleanly into production with no production or user issues following deployment without regressing functions or data sets
- Provided guidance to other project managers concerning deployment tactics, planning, enterprise processes, and HP's PPM tool to overcome project problems and fortify their project management core competencies.
Project Manager
Dell Inc.
Rockville, MD
10.2011 - 03.2013
- Implemented a two phase, two release enterprise BYOD program
- Phase one research, policy, and ROM delivery was awarded with a 600k follow-on work award
- Phase two successfully delivered a two-release FIPS 140-2 compliant email, calendar, and contact solution to NRC employees personally owned mobile devices
- Wrote a Program Risk Management Plan for the ITISS contract that included governance definition, role breakouts, an online risk register, and reporting capabilities
- Completed a physical and virtual SLES asset upgrade project through an asset transfer and ownership plan which included outgoing vendor management, engineering upgrades, and an asset lifecycle process
- Completed an enterprise-class storage assessment project that created a net-new 7M contract award which directly satisfied the NRC's ITIM strategic plan and contributed toward the agency meeting the federally mandated data center consolidation objective
- The storage implementation award utilized assessment project recommendations such as a five-year ROI delivery roadmap; a director level storage architecture, network performance improvements; SAN strategies, WAN acceleration, and operational efficiencies
- Enabled transition to the NRC's target state ITIL enterprise environment by delivering projects embodying ITIL components through vendor, IT support team, and internal staff management: self-service delivery, service catalog entries fulfilled through the SRMS bound by Service Level Agreements with underpinning Operational Level Agreements; policy determination and delivery, defining an operational delivery and decommissioning process; integrating with the asset management system for billing and ownership needs.
Education
Master of Science - Information Systems Technology, Technical and Management
The George Washington University
Washington, DC 10.2010 - 05.2012
Bachelor of Arts - English
Eastern Connecticut State University
Willimantic, CT 10.1994 - 05.1999
Skills
Planning and Roadmapping
KPIs
Cross-functional Team Delivery
Alignment
Agile
Process and Process Improvement
Dashboards
Certification
CAL-E
Timeline
CSPO
03-2023
SA, 5.1
02-2023
CAL-E
02-2022
CAL-T
02-2022
CAL-O
02-2022
Delivery Principal
Kin + Carta
10.2021 - 04.2023
Program Manager
NextPlay Technologies
03.2020 - 10.2021
Project Manager
Royal Caribbean International
09.2019 - 12.2019
Senior Project Manager
Blue Cross Blue Shield Of South Carolina
09.2017 - 02.2019
Project Manager
INova Hospital
07.2017 - 09.2017
CSM
01-2017
Senior Project Manager
Fannie Mae
05.2013 - 07.2017
Project Manager
Dell Inc.
10.2011 - 03.2013
Master of Science - Information Systems Technology, Technical and Management
The George Washington University
10.2010 - 05.2012
Bachelor of Arts - English
Eastern Connecticut State University
10.1994 - 05.1999