Kara Knowski
Slinger,WI
Summary
Goal oriented Servant leader who enjoys complex business and technical projects across many industries. Specializes in saving failing projects. Leverages data driven recommendations, business, technical and soft skill education and experience to align all stake holders. Establishes and fosters open communication and encourages each person's unique skills and experiences to efficiently provide the highest quality deliverables.
Overview
16
16
years of professional experience
Work History
Senior Business Analyst / Product Owner
Generac Power Systems (Consultant)
12.2021 - 09.2023
- Consolidated 5 home grown system functionalities and data to one user friendly application to support over 200,000 dealers
- Liason between business departments and technical teams to align all stake holders and guide product roadmaps and priorities
- Utilized Scrum methodologies to 'thin slice' requirements to highlight nimble business value through continuous delivery every two weeks
Senior Technical Program Manager
Milwaukee County (Consultant)
12.2020 - 11.2021
- Successful implementation helped more than 1 million Milwaukee County Residents obtain help (food, housing, utilities) through the No Wrong Door initiative
- Lead project teams of internal and external stakeholders to revitalize a difficult technical project
- Executed software implementation, data migration, rollout plans and training
Program Director, Special Projects
THE KERN FAMILY FOUNDATION
07.2016 - 12.2020
- Corrected a failing $ 1.3 million application development project into a $2.8 million widely adopted successful custom application
- Lead multiple project teams including 15+ direct reports from vendors, internal stakeholders, developers, marketing, quality assurance, search engine optimization, analytics, national network of engineering professors across 40 colleges and universities
- Managed relationships and conflict between stakeholders through communication practices and conflict resolution training and skills
- Directly accountable to Board of Directors and Executive Leadership team
Project Manager
7SUMMITS (Consultant)
05.2016 - 07.2016
- Responsible for scope, delivery, resources, and budget of cutting-edge online community development project
- Established onboarding and training plans for all new project managers
Project Manager, Infrastructure & Operations
Ashley Furniture (Consultant)
11.2014 - 05.2016
- Corrected failing project by identifying global outages which prevented sales and stopped manufacturing costing unquantifiable loss of profit
- Proposed and executed $ 2.4 million upgrade and standardization of global network including 8 manufacturing plants and over 200,000 dealers. Average downtime improved by 43%
- Critical leader and team member, responsible for defining and creating enterprise standards, best practices, workflows, standardizations etc
Education
M.S. Degree in Management -
Cardinal Stritch University
Milwaukee, WIB.S. Degree in Business Administration -
Cardinal Stritch University
Milwaukee, WISkills
- Goal oriented servant leader
- Strong communication and conflict resolution
- Stong Technical acumen
- Strong Business acumen
- Strong soft skills
- Agile Methodology
- Scrum Framework
- Strategic Planning and Alignment
- Application development
- Product Owner
- Budget Forecasting and management
- Business and technical analysis
- Problem Identification and solution recommendations
- Product Roadmapping development and execution
- Design thinking
- Marketing Program Management
- Business Needs Analysis
- Creative and Innovative
- Business Objective Analysis
- Data-driven decision-making
- Google Analytics understanding
- Market Research Analysis
- Google Analytics
- Azure DevOps
- User Acceptance Testing
- Promotional Events
- Strategic Planning
- Proposal Development
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
- Cross-departmental Alignment
- Strategic Visioning
- Competitor Analysis
- Corporate Communications
- Key relationship development
- Customer Empathy
- Data Analytics
- Content Development
- Salesforce CRM Software
- MS Office Suite
- Customer Retention Strategies
- Stakeholder relationship management
- Backlog Prioritization
- Stakeholder Management
- Release planning
- Contract Management
- Microsoft SharePoint
- Relationship Building
- Product Promotion
- Root Cause Analysis
- Content Curation
- Google Adwords
- Product Metrics Tracking
- Database Management
- Contract Negotiation
- Risk Management
- Competitive Analysis
- Marketing campaigns
- Use Case Study Generation
- Risk Assessments
- Staff Management
- Product Lifecycle Management
- Software Development Life Cycle
- SEO Optimization
Veteran Status
UNITED STATES AIR FORCE VETERAN, OPERATION ENDURING FREEDOM
Affiliations
- Member, Agile SAFE
- Milwaukee S/E Chapter of Project Management Professionals
- Milwaukee Software Process Improvement Network
- Member, 2014- current
- Board member Vice President, 2015-2016
Professional Training Certifications
- SAFe PO/PM
- Google Analytics
- Azure cloud services
- Azure Dev Ops
- Jira
- Trello
- Agile
- Scrum
- Waterfall
- Hurlburt field and Shepard air force base, military leadership
- Feverbee, online community management training
- Journeyman Certificate as Maintenance Data Systems Analyst; courses in Database Management
Areas Of Competency
- Cost Reductions
- Solving complex problems with simple and sustainable solutions
- Continous delivery of technical features that provide high business value
- Strong cross-functional communication
- Workflow and overall efficiencies
- LEAN Solutions
- Scrum
- Agile
- SaS
- Operational Efficiencies
- Procedure Development
- Change Management
- Strategic Planning
- Quality Improvement
- Resource Allocation
- Budget Development
- Data Migration
- Vendor Negotiations
- Relationship Building
- Conflict Resolution
Timeline
Senior Business Analyst / Product Owner
Generac Power Systems (Consultant)
12.2021 - 09.2023
Senior Technical Program Manager
Milwaukee County (Consultant)
12.2020 - 11.2021
Program Director, Special Projects
THE KERN FAMILY FOUNDATION
07.2016 - 12.2020
Project Manager
7SUMMITS (Consultant)
05.2016 - 07.2016
Project Manager, Infrastructure & Operations
Ashley Furniture (Consultant)
11.2014 - 05.2016
M.S. Degree in Management -
Cardinal Stritch University
B.S. Degree in Business Administration -
Cardinal Stritch University
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