Resume - Nov. 2004

Paul A. Avard

228 Bogue Rd. * Weare, New Hampshire 03261

http://www.oocities.org/p_avard/index.html

Project Management

Skilled professional with over 14 years experience in optimizing understaffed teams and achieving improved quality within aggressive schedules, within or under budget. Strong leadership skills and organizational skills. Proven ability to develop and implement systems, assess project scopes and manage projects. Ability to evaluate and develop policies and procedures which result in cost reductions and shorter project cycles and which provide project trajectory metrics. Systematically and consistently increase corporate profitability by optimizing use of available resources.

Experienced in managing simultaneous projects, scoping projects, managing distributed resources, estimating required project cycles, providing real*time tracking of task progression and producing comprehensive risk assessment. Creative at resource utilization consistent with business needs and goals.

Professional Experience

2/2000*8/2004 First Virtual Communications Nashua, NH (formerly CUseeMe Networks, Inc.> formerly White Pine Software).

QA Manager for Click to Meet Conference Server rich*media software. This product includes a multi*point conference unit (MCU) * VoIP application for H.323, T.120, SIP, CU protocols. This technology includes transcoding between codecs, server linking, RTP audio mixing and video switching. In this role, I was also responsible for all Project Management duties concurrent to managing the QA Engineering Team.

► I was hired at FVC to introduce total quality processes and project lifecycle methods. I developed a gating process to track project deliverables and milestones through measurable criterion, thus establishing AQL. This decreased the defect persistence rate of shipping products by 62*66%

► The typical project cycle for major releases was nine months for a product of dubious quality. Within one year, I rebuilt the team with no increase in resources to a high*performance team that consistently produced excellent releases of the same magnitude and greater, within 9*12 week cycles.

►Interviewed and hired QA staff for my team as well as a spawn*off team.

►Developed standards for test plan development to provide traceability from marketing requirements, engineering requirements, problem tickets, use cases and specifications.

►Introduced a central repository for lab resource allocation.

►Introduced project scoping and scheduling by use of MS Project and Excel.

►Introduced defect trend analysis and project trajectory tracking, presenting metrics graphically as well as pivot tables.

►Mentored team towards setting and pursuing career goals.

►Corporate DBA for defects, RFE and Requirements databases.

2/1990*2/2000 Autodesk BDE Division Manchester NH (Formerly Softdesk> Formerly DCA Software) Quality Assurance Team Leader for Architectural Desktop 1.0 & 2.0. Highly successfully projects.

Distinguished member and contributor of a core team which developed a detailed Product Lifecycle system at Autodesk. The most experienced people from each organization within the company were selected to comprise a think*tank tasked with understanding all tasks, deliverables and cross*dependencies of each department. The goal was to provide awareness and understanding of these throughout the company to produce optimal performance, excellence and cohesion across teams. The outcome was a comprehensive documentation of cross*functional “Product Lifecycle Operating Procedures”.

► As project QA leader, I simultaneously managed an automation team in India, black box testing teams in Sweden and interoperability testing in Boulder, CO. while managing on*site application engineers. This project was successful, producing a demonstrably ready*to*ship product on time and under budget. No subsequent patch*releases were ever required for mainstream use case anomalies.

►Devised strategies for testing automation and directed automation team using QA Partner and AutoCAD script (.scr) language as well as Autolisp.

►Developed streamline practices for reconciling test cases against feature specifications.

► Mastered network license server technologies (IPX and TCP/IP protocols)

► Developed process for defect trend analysis.

► Managed resources for black box testing, white box testing code coverage analysis and testing automation.

►Successfully met and exceeded all personal performance goals for duration of employment at Autodesk.

► Senior Technical Support * Team Leader / QA Analyst for all architectural, structural and mechanical product lines.

Supported platforms included DOS, Windows 3.1, Solaris, Novell, Win95, NT 3.51 and NT 4.0.

5/1990*8/1990 NH Vocational Technical College Manchester, NH Associate Professor in AutoCad R10.

►Instructed two classes in AutoCAD R10.

Education and Professional Development

2002 National Safety Council * OSHA * Basics of Safety Performance for Small Business

2001 New Horizons, Nashua, NH * Microsoft Project

1999 MS Certified Training Programs, Bedford, NH * Introduction to Visual Basic

1998 Autodesk, Henniker, NH * AutoCAD Level II (Proprietary product/certification)

1998 NH Technical Institute, Concord, NH * Intro. To C++

1995 Employee Leadership Certificate, (Proprietary Management Training) Autodesk, Santa Clara CA

1994 Sun Microsystems, Nashua NH * Solaris 2.x System Administrator II

1989 Polytechnic Institute of NE, Nashua, NH * Certificates in CADD, drafting and technical math.

1988 NH Vocational Technical College, Manchester, NH * Commercial Layout and Design Graphics.

1978 UNH, Manchester, NH * 2 year study in Developmental Psychology.