At Pappas Group, a niche advertising agency for the Washington DC area, my initial responsibilities quickly grew from the Senior Managing Developer, as hired, to overall Technical Director responsible for technical implementation across all projects as well as technical oversight over all internal IT operations including hardware procurement and maintenance.
In this role, I was responsible for the technical project planning, management, implementation and development for key clients in the business as well as technical direction over other technical resources and their projects. Responsibilities range from designing the information architecture, project plans and execution strategies, engaging and assisting designers as needed, to coding front end and back end of projects. Challenges on a daily basis would include juggling client deliverables and managing internal and external communications across a project, to maintaining server uptime, to building a database model for an internal project need.
I currently lead all members of the technical team (5 people) on a daily basis to assure that all internal and external goals were completed on time, as designed, and as requested. Accounts range from small (Lentigen) to large (Discovery).
At Proxicom, an E-commerce Creative and Web Development firm, I began my career as a Creative Producer responsible for creative project management, creative coordination and articulation across stakeholders including business owners and development, as well as managing client expectations. In search of more hands on creative development and with the desire to be apart of the development lifecycle, I transitioned to information design and development on similar projects in my next role.
As a Creative Technologist and Information Architect, my technical training and interpersonal skills enabled me to help clients design a creative and effective solution for building a corporate presence on the web and then actually create and implement those visions online. In the design process, I led creative design and execution brainstorming sessions where my role walked them through key decisions such as: developing a solution in house versus enhancing a packaged CMS system to coding a site in PHP versus JSP versus ASP.
Before leaving to work for Pappas Group, I led technical teams on accounts such as Volkswagen, Toyota, and Lexus.
Wall Street on Demand, a web design and development firm focused on financial research for retail consumers, was the first job where my self-taught technical skills and innate personal skills opened my eyes for not only a strong career path but the understanding of how productive the web and online world could be. In this role, my web skills were fostered and mentored in a strong team environment and company wide sense of pride and ownership in each project you were apart of no matter how big or small. I leveraged every opportunity to learn and was inspired to give back as well.
In addition to my project duties which including self-management, planning, and developing, I led bi-monthly discussions on web technologies such as DHTML, CSS and Flash.
Key projects and team leadership responsibilities included: Schwab, Fidelity and Goldman Sachs.