Robert L. Hays

Woodland Hills, CA | 818.836.0509 | purplehayz@earthlink.net | www.linkedin.com/in/electricbob/

Director of Technology

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.

Areas of Expertise

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

Experience

AT&T (formerly DIRECTV), Los Angeles, CA 2010 - Present

Director - Technology, mid 2020 - Present

Led 3 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

Oversaw a team of 25 employees and 50-150 on- and off-shore partner team members. Managed 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 US, Central America, Philippines, and the DIRECTV Sales system written in Java.

• 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 2 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 to improve delivery quality.

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, resulting in improved performance and implementation speed and quality.
• Used static code analysis to identify opportunities for refactoring.
• Improved performance of Offers system by 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%.

Additional Relevant Experience

Classmates.Com, Woodland Hills, CA, Software Development Manager

Managed a 9 member development team, consisting of both software engineering and quality assurance roles. 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. 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, IL, First Vice President, Manager, Enterprise Architecture North America

Managed 8-member IT Enterprise Architecture team for the North American region. 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 | Senior Programmer/Analyst

Managed 6 developers, 2 quality assurance and testing engineers, 2 information management specialists, 1 graphic artist, and 2 support staff. 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.

G-Bar Limited Partnership, Chicago, IL, 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.

Education

Bachelor of Science (BS), Mathematics

George Mason University, Fairfax, VA

Professional Affiliations

WLE Toastmasters Club, Member, former President | Finance Toastmasters Club, Member | MacValley Users Group, Member | Association for Computing Machinery, Member

Professional Training

Certificate in IT Business Leadership, NYU School of Professional Studies

Scrum Master training, Danube Technologies, Inc.

Leadership Development Program, ABN AMRO

Leadership Development Program, Center for Creative Leadership

Additional Relevant Information

Managed a command, control, communications and intelligence system for the Royal Saudi Naval Forces. Worked for a software product company for 3 years. Performed real-time programming in a high-energy physics research laboratory for 6 years.