Robert L. Hays

Woodland Hills, CA        http://www.alephnaught.com/        H: 818.715.0806

purplehayz@earthlink.net        C: 818.836.0509

Information Technology leader that loves fast-paced environments, forming new teams, and improving the performance of existing teams; experienced with improving delivery within waterfall and agile methodologies and taking teams to Scrum for agile delivery. Coaches and provides fast, accurate feedback to build successful teams. Experiments with new and unique approaches to achieve exceptional results. Experienced with software architecture, software development and operations.

Skills

Software Development Management | Enterprise Architecture | Strategy / Planning | Project and Team Leadership | Vendor Relationship / Contract Management / Outsourcing | Regulatory Compliance | Software Development Process Mapping/Design/Optimization | Certified Scrummaster | Presentations / Public Speaking | Salesforce / Cloud | Operations / Problem Management

Professional Experience

AT&T (formerly DIRECTV), Los Angeles, California        2010 – present

Director - Technology, mid 2020 – present

Responsible for three teams of 10 employees and 40-60 on- and off-shore team members providing problem management, voice of customer analysis, and dashboards and reporting for the AT&T website.

• Influenced product delivery teams to handle all severity 1 defects within SLA.
• Defined incident and problem management process based on ITIL and company practices.
• Redefined severity based upon objective customer impact, resulting in better categorization of defects and reducing customer impact by reducing MTTR for highest impacting issues.
• Delivered machine learning/artificial intelligence based categorization of Voice of Customer information to make it more actionable by product delivery teams.

Director - Technology, 2013 – mid 2020

Responsible for a team of 25 employees and 50 - 150 on- and off-shore partner team members. Managing customer experience monitoring and production support team for MyAT&T.com Sales and Service website, using Dynatrace and Catchpoint for monitoring, Tealeaf for session replay, and Splunk for log file processing. Also accountable for Salesforce solutions from DIRECTV, used by over 40,000 call center agents, and for Java- and Jacada-based residential sales solution used by over 3000 agents, spread across the US, Central America and the Philippines.

• Ensured high quality; Residential Sales Acquisition system was available 99.998% of the time in 2015 and 2018 and reduced open production defects from 140 to 15 in less than a year
• Cut average handle time for calls for commercial care agents by 4 seconds resulting in $4 million in annual reduced costs and slashed average handle time for calls for Residential Sales agents by over 20 seconds and agent training time to 3 ½-day sessions
• Delivered an account management system in half the budgeted time
• Implemented DevOps for two Salesforce orgs, reducing time-to-market and improving quality
• Transformed the development approach for packaged applications at DIRECTV. Introduced Conference Room Pilots which significantly reduced customization of packaged applications and reduced time-to-market; this approach was used for all integration projects for the AT&T acquisition
• Moved Multi-Dwelling Unit Salesforce delivery team, including business partners, from waterfall to Scrum

Sr. Manager, Enterprise Offers, 2010 - 2012

Created and managed a 7 person development team that customized the Comergent e-commerce engine for enterprise-wide offer management.

• Created Java team; utilized agile approaches to improve teamwork and morale
• Created and taught class on working with legacy Java software, resulted in improved performance and implementation speed and quality
• Used static code analysis to identify opportunities for refactoring
• Improved performance of the Offers system by over 50%; created strategy for development performance testing to reduce last-minute performance issues; managed cross-functional team to work on performance issues
• Moved software build to shared continuous environment based on Hudson to reduce downtime for developers during builds and support development smoke testing
• Implemented FITness testing framework, which reduced errors found in production by 25%

CLASSMATES.COM, Woodland Hills, California        2008 – 2009

Software Development Manager

Managed a 9 member development team, consisting of both software engineering and quality assurance roles, using Bugzilla, Confluence, Eclipse, Endeca, Java, JavaScript, Jira, MediaWiki, Perl, Resin, SharePoint, Splunk, Spring 2 and Subversion.  

• Added to corporate top line by significantly improving run-time performance of our best-returning ad, resulting in an increase of over 100% in that ad’s revenue
• Integrated team with company by improving communications and moved team to the Scrum development process, resulting in improved delivery metrics for those parts of the solution
• Improved agility by changing source code control branching approach which reduced the time to repair and deploy fixes to production by one week on average
• Increased quality through improved testing approaches and end-to-end traceability of requirements, reducing serious bugs found in production by 80%

ABN AMRO SERVICES COMPANY (LaSalle Bank), Chicago, Illinois        1997 – 2007

First Vice President, Manager, Enterprise Architecture North America, 2003 - 2007

Managed eight-member IT Enterprise Architecture team for the North American region.

• Developed and implemented strategy for enterprise architecture consisting of principles, reference architectures and glossaries and taxonomies
• Defined common roadmap content, performed security architecture, defined and developed reference architectures
• Developed enterprise-level architectures including J2EE, Business Objects and Oracle
• Improved project delivery by creating an architecture governance process integrated with the global ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) change management process
• Created IT policies and standards, and improved processing exceptions to corporate policies and standards and added reference architectures as part of standards to provide implementation direction, improving project delivery and regulatory compliance
• Led team for proposals to the CIOs and COOs for global application rationalization

Architect and Development Manager, 2000 - 2003

Development Manager for a team of six developers, two quality assurance and testing engineers, two information management specialists, one graphic artist, and two support staff

• Designed and developed novel integration solution based on SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)
• Created and used agile processes internally and for six off-shore development efforts in India and Russia
• Started a spin-off company, Neogration, Inc., which sold this solution
• Patent applied for this software
• Created RFPs and participated in vendor negotiations with MySQL, an open source database supplier, and Majoris, a mid-size Indian offshoring company, valued over $200,000

Senior Programmer / Analyst, 1997 - 2000

Developed and supported interest rate derivative trading tools using SunGard Infinity library, C++, and backoffice tools using JPython, Python and TCL

• Led team that built a data warehouse transformation and load tool using Java and JPython; solution was built within budget and time constraints and was proven to be scalable
• Developed interest rate derivatives trading tools using C++, CORBA, Java, Python and TCL

G-BAR LIMITED PARTNERSHIP, Chicago, Illinois                                                     1994 - 1997

Senior Programmer/Analyst

• Developed software that found hedge spreads for arbitrage trades and identified unmatched trades with the clearing corporation; developed general front and back office software
• Managed UNIX systems and a Telekurs ticker data feed system

Education

Bachelor of Science, Mathematics, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia

Professional Affiliations

Member, former President, WLE Toastmasters Club, 2011 – present

Member, Finance Toastmasters Club, 2011 - present

Member, MacValley Users Group, 2008 - 2013

Member, Association for Computing Machinery, 2007 – present

Professional Training

Certificate in IT Business Leadership, NYU School of Professional Studies, 2015

Scrum Master training, Danube Technologies, Inc., 2009

Leadership Development Program, ABN AMRO, 2005

Leadership Development Program, Center for Creative Leadership, 2002

Additional Relevant Information

Managed a command, control, communications and intelligence system for the Royal Saudi Naval Forces.  Worked for a software product company for three years.  Performed real-time programming in a high-energy physics research laboratory for six years.