Michael Lackman has over 30 years of technology and software development including 16 years of project management experience in telecommunications, e-commerce, military communications systems, education and research, manufacturing, financial decision support systems, and commercial software. Michael Lackman has experience in improving the business value of technology projects through the application of agile and conventional project management best practices and by closely aligning projects with corporate vision and goals; improving a company’s project management maturity; building high-performance project teams; effectively controlling costs, schedules, scope and quality; identifying, mitigating and managing risks; and improving communications with the project team, stakeholders, company executives, customers and clients.

Professional Experience:

StrategicPM - Sr. Project Management Consultant – 7/1998 to present
Provided technology project management, requirements analysis, cost and schedule control, earned value analysis, risk identification and management, procurement, team building and motivation, and systems development using best-practice conventional and agile methodologies. Clients include:

• LotusOrganics.com (Iowa) – 1/2004 to 8/2009
  Business planning and development; e-commerce retail implementation using SQL Server for customer and products database; managed daily operations for web-based consumer retail outlet. All projects were managed using Agile project management.
• TKG Communications (Detroit, MI) – 5/2003 to 10/2003
  Provided business development, requirements analysis, telecom service definition, project planning, and presentations to Ford Motor executives for cost-effective international voice and data communications services for Ford Motor in China.
• Convergia Networks (Montreal, Canada) – 2/2002 to 8/2002
  Requirements analysis, development and implementation scheduling for wholesale and residential billing of international traffic for an international telecom specializing in South American telecom services. Operations and SQL database migration to a more secure, higher performance Command Center to improve the quality of service and database redundancy. Responsible for IS/IT and network staffing and team building. Improve and standardize management traffic and revenue reports.
• NeoPost Online (San Jose, CA – subsidiary of NeoPost Group, France) – 5/2001 to 12/2001
  Project managed the integration of newly acquired shipping services and products into the NeoPost family of Internet technologies for online postage and package shipping services and products.
• Iowa Telecom (Iowa) – 5/2000 to 4/2001 – Provided project proposal, contract negotiations, staffing and team building, project management for a large telecom customer database merger of Qwest customer records into Iowa Telecom’s customer record database.

Telegroup, Inc. (Iowa) – VP Engineering – 12/1994 to 4/1998
Responsible for creating, staffing, managing and leading the Intelligent Networks department to integrate all technology development, engineering and technical support teams for a rapidly growing international telecom carrier into a single, disciplined engineering organization to develop and support a tightly integrated international telecommunications system architecture.

• Established a Program Management Office (PMO) to foster project management maturity and program managed all technology development projects for the design, development, deployment and operations of all IT and engineering systems, including programmable switching platforms, voice networks, billing, commissions, order entry, provisioning and customer care. The PMO grew to 5 project managers and improved project management consistency and success within the company.
• Built an IT and engineering software development and operations department from inception to more than 162 engineers, software developers and support staff in five locations worldwide providing service to customers in 170 countries. Coached and mentored staff to create high performance teams.
• Set and managed aggressive but realistic goals, milestones, schedules, budgets and expectations.
• Planned and managed engineering department budgets of $12M without budget overruns.
• Process reengineered new customer order entry processes that reduced customer provisioning times by more than 98%, reduced customer service response times by 35% with significantly improved quality and customer satisfaction, and reduced overall process costs by 30%.
• Provided the technical leadership to grow a small $68.7M privately-held callback company into a $330M facilities-based, publicly traded, international telecom corporation. Telegroup was on the INC 500 list of the fastest growing U.S. private companies for two years prior to becoming a public company.
• Worked closely with marketing and sales organizations to define new telecom products and services.

MCI (Iowa, Texas, Colorado) – Sr. Project Manager – 7/1991 to 12/1994
Project manager for projects extending the MCI telecom network infrastructure to support improved customer products for MCI and their Global Alliance partners. Responsibilities included budget preparation, project oversight, team building, and technical leadership.

• Successfully co-managed complex business transformational projects with challenging interdependencies that spanned multiple development locations across countries and companies as part of MCI's Global Alliance program. Managed projects with budgets exceeding $10M.
• Negotiated Alliance objectives and requirements; set key deliverables; defined project milestones and schedules; project managed planning, development and testing;
• Project managed the BT Cashless Project to adapt and place MCI Intelligent Network components, calling card technology and necessary billing components into British Telecom’s consumer products for their U.K. market;
• Managed development teams creating Intelligent Network components such as SS7 TCAP platforms, X25 gateways, and voice recognition platforms to support consumer products and operator services;

Computer Associates, Inc – Development Project Manager – 12/1987 to 6/1991
Responsible for all phases of project management for commercial IT product software including pre-sales, large customer support and user conference presentations. Stakeholders included customer groups, product owners, marketing managers, sales teams, support staff, and 6-member software development team.

PRIOR EMPLOYMENT – 1974 TO 1991

Resource Consulting Group – Founder and Sr. Consultant – 6/1980 to 12/1987
Provided consulting and software development services on a wide variety of projects. Clients and projects included:

• Teledyne Systems – Device drivers and test platforms for custom hardware processors for radiation hardened military satellite communications for MILSTAR project;
• Hughes Radar Systems – Computer Aided Engineering and systems administration for VLSI / VHSIC design for U.S. Navy project;
• Banker Trust – Development of decision support and office information systems for international loan department officers;
• Digital Equipment Corporation – Strategic planning and design for VLSI CAD database to be used in the design of next-generations processors;
• Interactive Systems Corporation – Developed a multi-channel, asynchronous communications device driver to allow Unix and VAX/VMS systems to interconnect;
• Global Integration Technologies – Software development for a Japanese Kanji word processor;

California Institute of Technology – 5/1978 to 5/1980 – System Administrator for Computer Science Graduate Department reporting to Dr. Ivan Sutherland. Provided system administration and research support for the Department’s Silicon Structures Project which was exploring specialized hardware / software design workstation technologies for VLSI.

Digital Equipment Corporation – 8/1976 to 5/1978 – Software Engineer for COBOL compiler and database management system.

Weyerhauser Corporation – 3/1976 to 8/1976 – Systems Programmer for realtime process control manufacturing systems.

University of Oregon – 9/1973 to 1/1975 – Systems Programmer on DECsystem-10 timeshare computer supporting students, faculty and research community users.

EDUCATION:
University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, 1974; BS in Computer Science
Villanova University, 2009; Master Certificate in Project Management for IS/IT Professionals

ORGANIZATIONS:
Member of the Project Management Institute (PMI)
Certified Project Management Professional (PMP)

PATENTS:
MCI SS7 Gateway Architecture. Patent #5,966,431


INDEPTH OVERVIEW OF MICHAEL LACKMAN, PROJECT MANAGER

OBJECTIVE:
To improve the business value of technology projects through the application of agile and conventional project management best practices and by closely aligning projects with corporate vision and goals; to improve a company's project management maturity; to build high-performance project teams; to effectively control costs, schedules, scope and quality; to identify, mitigate and manage risks; and to improve communications with the project team, stakeholders, company executives, customers and clients.

PROFESSIONAL PROFILE OVERVIEW:
IT – Technology Development Project Manager

• More than 30 years experience in technology and software development;
• Demonstrated skills and experience to manage and lead all phases of technology projects to successful completion and to build business value;
• Excels at managing large, complex projects that meet the needs of customers and stakeholders, are aligned to company business processes and corporate goals, and complete on-time, on-budget by using best project management practices spanning from agile to traditional methodologies;
• Proven technical, organizational, budgetary, management, leadership, and team building skills across a broad range of industries in telecom, commercial software, Internet retail and web services, aerospace, banking, R&D, and education.

AREAS OF EXPERTISE:

• Multi-location, multi-company projects. Successfully managed complex business transformational projects with challenging interdependencies that spanned multiple development locations across countries and companies as part of MCI’s larger Global Alliance program. Lackman has a history of successfully deploying large-scale, high impact, complex projects on-time / on-budget and with measurable business benefits. Project budgets typically exceeded $20M.
• Multi-project program management. As the VP Engineering at Telegroup, Lackman program managed multiple, concurrent projects for developing commissions and billing systems, international switch platform rollouts, customer care systems, and telecom software. He has honed the increased organizational and communication skills required to effectively lead simultaneous projects.
• Internet and e-Commerce. Because of their creative content and propensity for change, web site and e-c0mmerce development projects require different tools, techniques and strategies to bring them to completion quickly and to successfully meet customer and stakeholder needs, requirements and expectations. Michael Lackman has been leading and managing Internet development project since 1995 for B2B, retail, Web services, and customer care Internet development projects.
• Project definition and business process alignment. Experienced at defining the project scope to fit business needs, requirements, and constraints and aligning technology projects with company business processes and corporate goals. Effective at using change management and communication to control project scope creep.
• Team building and motivation. Proven to be highly effective at team building and motivation of existing development teams, bringing together teams for different companies and locations and in recruiting, hiring and creating new technology development teams.
• Communication. With more than 30 years in technology development, Michael has developed effective and productive verbal, written and presentation skills for communicating with project stakeholders, executive management, and team members. He is a published author and speaker on Project Management.
• Aligning technology development to support corporate growth. As VP of Engineering at Telegroup, Inc., Lackman built an engineering, software development and operations department from inception to more than 162 engineers, software developers and support personnel in five locations worldwide providing service to customers in 170 countries. The engineering department that Lackman created excelled in productivity, efficiency and accomplishment. He created a coherent telecom engineering organization with a common, unified vision of how to architect and create the switch, network and back office systems necessary to support the strategic business directions of the company and to align IT with company business processes. The results were greatly improved fiscal visibility into sales, improved marketing efficiency resulting in increased sales and customer retention, improved executive management visibility into key business processes, more efficient operations and customer support resulting in reduced costs, and lower IT and technology costs by eliminating unnecessary systems and improving poorly performing systems. Planned and managed engineering department budgets of $12M without budget overruns
• Executive management. As a contributing member of the executive management team at Telegroup, Lackman helped provide the technical and business leadership to grow from a small $68.7M privately held callback company into a $330M facilities-based, publicly traded, international telecom corporation. The company was on the INC 500 list of the fastest growing U.S. private companies for two years prior to becoming a public company.
• Managing rapid growth. When Lackman joined in 1994, Telegroup was struggling to cope with rapid growth. Telegroup had deep entrepreneurial roots but lacked management expertise. Because of his extensive previous management experience, Lackman helped lead Telegroup in the business process transition from a startup to a public corporation. He instituted the first departmental capital and operating budgets, cost variance accounting for actual-to-projected, project management, and business processes to help Telegroup cope with rapid growth.

Please contact us to learn more on how we can work together to achieve greater project success.