I recruited Michael in March, 2004 for the position of senior applications engineer. He left in July, 2004 in response to a move within our company to outsource IT.
During his time with us Michael developed one back-end .NET application and designed one ASP.NET site with a back-end database. He also organized the team to perform technical reviews and had them evaluate his product. Michael led the team to create and adopt a disciplined methodology for systems development, including effective use of UML (Unified Modeling Language). He served as a development coach to our other engineers.
In addition to his technical skills, Michael brought solid knowledge of project management. Before starting any project he requested users to identify an executive sponsor and a business manager who would be accountable for business success. He led the team to prepare template documents for Project Definition and Business Requirements, which we then asked users to populate. He also developed procedures for managing a project change budget and for migrating developed code into production.
Michael demonstrates considerable finesse managing vendors. For example, he negotiated the delivery of eight modules of missing source code from a company that we were on the verge of legal action with. He built a relationship with the consultant who had written the code, then brought him in and had him document his previous work. When this was successful he extended his contract to have him contribute to a difficult part of a development project.
Michael also organized our web design company, our web server co-lo company and our Marketing company to coordinate a major upgrade to the company’s web sites. Moreover, he was our “point man” for a set of special reports that IT generated for the Florida Attorney-General. Throughout his time with me, Michael has demonstrated versatility, commitment and drive. He generates creative solutions, organizes and implements ideas and gets people onside to make them succeed. Given the opportunity, I would rehire Michael in a New York minute. Michael is someone you can count on.
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