Paul A. Avard

228 Bogue Rd. – Weare, New Hampshire 03261

Home (603) 529-5023 pavard1@hotmail.com

Project Management / Software Quality Assurance Management

Product Lifecycle Refinement - Project Scoping & Planning - Team Building

Skilled professional with over 14 years experience in optimizing understaffed teams and achieving improved quality within aggressive schedules. Skillful in integrating QA process throughout the product lifecycle. 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.

Professional Skills

Project Management: Skillful in managing simultaneous projects, scoping projects, managing distributed resources, and estimating required testing time given available resources. Creative at resource utilization consistent with business needs. Providing real-time tracking of tasks and progress.

SQA Management and Team Building: Excellent at identifying core competencies of individuals and leveraging them to provide job satisfaction and productivity. Building synergy across functional teams to provide common vision between QA, Development, Product Management, Project Management, Technical Support, Sales Engineers and Business Development.

Quality Assurance Process Design and Refinement: Known for optimizing minimal resources for shorter project cycles that consistently produce better quality products. Proficient in software life cycle concepts. Able to identify areas of testing that are remiss as well as testing redundancies and optimizing QA efforts for maximum return.

Client Support/ Management: My career in the IT industry was launched by a four and a half year stint as customer support. I was quickly recognized as a key individual to provide timely and professional response and solutions to clients. At DCA and Softdesk, I launched an initiative to assign stratified support and was subsequently assigned the liaison roles with the most significant clientele of the company.

Accomplishments

Ø 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”.

Ø Managed local teams while coordinating remote global teams and outsource personnel in multiple-concurrent projects. Led the campaign for a code rewrite of V.1.0 AutoCAD Architectural Products to a new object-based source written in C++. This was considered the greatest undertaking the company division had realized to date. 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.

Ø I was hired at FVC to introduce software quality assurance processes and project lifecycle SOP’s. FVC had previously experienced considerable friction between QA and Development, as well as most other groups. There were few defined processes in place. Two weeks following my arrival, the flagship product was released with over 600 critical defects. The QA team had insufficient test plans and no real strategy in place for testing products. The typical QA cycle for major releases was nine months. 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. I mended the fractured relationships between groups, and established synergy, harmony and collaboration across these groups.

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.

Ø Assembled a team of high-performance QA Engineers, thus reducing project cycle time from 9 months to 9-12 weeks. Interviewed and hired QA staff for my team as well as a spawn-off team.

Ø Developed standards for test plans development to provide traceability from marketing requirements, engineering requirements, problem tickets and specifications.

Ø Introduce test automation process via Perl scripts and XML for web-based applications.

Ø Rebuilt entire suite of test plans and mentored team to better test plan writing methods.

Ø Introduced white box testing practices and tools, including packet tracers and spectrum analyzers and API-level testing.

Ø Introduced new AQL planning process. Introduced a central repository for lab resource allocation.

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

Ø Introduced defect trend analysis and project trajectory tracking, presenting metrics graphically and in pivot tables.

Ø Mentored team towards setting and pursuing career goals.

Ø Decreased the defect persistence rate of shipping products by 62%

Ø 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.

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

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

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

Ø Developed process for defect trend analysis.

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

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

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

Ø 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.

Ø 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 Behavioral Psychology .