Michael Skolik


Summary

  • 20+ years experience in Project Management, Management and Pre-Sales Support
  • 20+ years of extensive experience in analysis, architecture, design and development of multiple-tier distributed systems, e-commerce, workflow and technical applications
  •  20+ years experience in System Administration (Unix, Windows)
  • 15+ years experience with the following RDBMS (Oracle, MS SQL Server, MySQL, Sybase)
  • Excellent communication and interpersonal skills
  • Creative, self-motivated, and enthusiastic. Quick learner. Strong creative problem-solving abilities
  • Excellent knowledge of object-oriented analysis and design
  • Expert level skills in:
    • designing and implementing web solutions and deploying Java Application
    • Java, J2EE, J2ME (Java Servlets, JSP, JDBC, EJB, Portlets),  PHP 4 & 5
    • JavaScript, CSS & HTML
    • legacy programming languages (Fortran, Pascal, C)
    • scripting Languages (Unix Shell scripts, Perl, TK, TCL)
  • Intermediate level skills in: PDF Javascript and Flex 2 (MXML, ActionScript) and Visual Basic
  • Intermediate level skills in Mobile Application Development (Android, iPhone)

Technical Skills

  • Operating Systems: Sun Solaris, Red Hat Linux, Dos, Windows, XP, HP-UX, AIX
  • Languages/Technologies : Java, J2EE (EJB, JNDI, JDBC, Servlets, JSP,Portlets), J2ME, C, C++, HTML, XML, UML, PL/SQL, Perl, Unix Shell scripting, CSS, HTML, AJAX, PHP, Fortran, Pascal, Visual Basic, ASP, PDF ActionScript, Flex 2, Apache, Tomcat, Ant, Eclipse
  • Databases: MySQL, Oracle, MS SQL server, Access, DB2, Sybase
  • Mailserver: Zimbra Mailserver - Authorized Reseller. Installation, Hosting, Zimblet development

Work experience

05/2010 – 09/2011    Senior Systems Architect
Moneybar Technologies Inc., Vancouver, Canada    http://moneybar.net

  • Systems Architect for sections of the Moneybar's Partner Connect System – a custom solution for CAA
  • Leading the IT-Integration Group consisting of the CIO's of all CAA-Clubs
  • Manage an international team of Solution Architects and supervise the implementation until successful launch
  • Communicate with Moneybar's and CAA's project manager in regards to timelines and deliverables
  • Evaluate technologies and methodologies for the CAA Training Team
  • Create System Documentation of the Partner Connect System for CAA
  • Perform Code Reviews
  • Develop System Architecture and prototypes for Moneybar's Smartphone App
  • Conceptual Design and Prototype development for a "cardless" Solution
  • Conceptual Design and Prototype development for a Moneybar Travel Solution
  • Technology Adviser to Moneybar's CEO and Senior Management

 

04/2008 – 03/2010    Project Manager
German Telekom / T-Mobile, Frankfurt, Germany    http://telekom.de

  • Project manager for an Enterprise service bus vendor evaluation and selection
  • Project manager to restructure the complete test infrastructure and methodology for all system and integration tests of all Telekom/T-Mobile software applications
  • PMO for multiple smaller projects with direct report to a senior manager

 

04/2006 – 03/2008    Project Manager / Team Lead
SIGMA International Consulting Ltd, Kelowna, Canada    http://www.sigma-ic.com/

  • Project management handling multiple international projects
  • Team lead for a group of international developer and system administrator
  • Responsible for all software development, contracts, proposals and budgets
  • Communicate with the client's project manager in regards to timelines and deliverables
  • Cooperation with external partner firms, e.g software supplier, consultants, marketing agencies
  • Evaluation of commercial and public domain software
  • Guest speaker at conferences and seminars
  • Responsible of multiple Web/Database/Mail/Application Sever, including outsourcing projects
  • Designed, developed and maintained numerous Web-based and Cell phone applications including the following technologies: Servlets/JSP, JDBC, ASP, PHP, HTML, Java Script, CSS, XML, J2ME, WAP, WML, Hibernate, Spring, Oracle, MySQL,  Access, and more.
  • Cooperation with pdfPictures.com to design and implement interactive PDF documents, including ActionScript programming, server side PDF creation and connecting PDF documents to databases.
  • Flex 2 Programming for Flash files using MXML and ActionScript
  • Business analysis, application and database design and implementation, Web- and Database setup, configuration, administration and tuning, design and develop applications, documentation
     

03/2001 - 03/2006    Senior System Consultant

Vodafone Global                     http://www.vodafone.com/

  • Responsible for the application support of their AMDOCS billing software. This included system administration, automation of support tasks, creation of dependency diagrams and feasibility reports for the implementation of subsystems.
  • Involved in the development of project plans for the implementation of new software releases which included: communicating with AMDOCS project -and production manager as well as Vodafone management,  close contact to AMDOCS developer, creation and visualization of the project plan and the project progress via Intranet, monitoring the execution of the project plan and triggering specialists if required
  • Responsible for the knowledge transfer between AMDOCS and Vodafone
  • Technical Architect and Systems analyst for a huge internal Web-based department portal with workflow support. This included several productivity tools and interfaces to a variety of exiting in-house systems.
  • Handled the design, implementation and support of the portal. Used Servlets, JSP, JDBC, MySQL, Oracle, Sybase, Tomcat. Worked closely with the Intranet team to comply with their development and design guidelines.

 

11/2000 - 02/2001    Chief Technology Officer

Roomlinx Inc, Vancouver, Canada                     http://www.roomlinx.com/

  • Responsible for Selection, Evaluation and Implementation of wireless network technologies
  • Responsible for all technical staff
  • Project Management handling multiple client projects
  • Establishment of strategic alliances with software vendor
  • Assisted the President / Senior VP in the development of strategic directions for the company
  • Conceptual Design, Project Management and Database Development of the Online Booking and Reservation engine "Reservex".

 

08/1998 - 10/2000      Senior System Consultant

Sun Microsystems Professional Services, Vancouver, Canada  - http://www.sun.com
GE Capital Professional Services, Vancouver, Canada  -  http://gecapsol.com

  • This was a contract position with both companies as a system consultant
  • Handled client requests on their behalf mostly related to Unix System Administration, Database Administration, Software installation and development, Disaster Recovery, Problem investigation, project management and security audit
  • Projects ranged between a couple of day up to 12 months
  • Clients: Global Telecom, Motorola (GPRS Lab), Newbridge, Labatt, ICBC, BC Tel, BC Credit Union, Victoria NCIL, Victoria Intercultural Assoc.,  Helsana Insurance / Switzerland

05/1995 - 07/1998       Systems Analyst

Ministry of Environment, Lands and Parks, Crown Land Registry Services, Victoria, Canada

  • UNIX System Administrator for the branch
  • Responsible for approx. 20 SUN application and Database server running ESRI Arc/Info GIS software and Oracle Databases.
  • Backup Windows NT System Administrator responsible for appox. 100 PC's
  • Responsible for the integration of UNIX and Microsoft servers, e.g. mail, printing, file sharing, backup
  • Oracle System Administrator
  • Arc/Info GIS System Application Administrator
  • Responsible for the installation and configuration to the technical infrastructure for the TANTALIS Project - a Web-based system supporting the administration of the Crown land registry http://srmwww.gov.bc.ca/clrs/business_solutions/tantalis/index.html
  • Website                     http://srmwww.gov.bc.ca/clrs/

01/1995 - 07/1998       College Professor

Camosun College, Victoria, Canada  -  http://www.camosun.bc.ca/
Okanagan University College, Kelowna, Canada  -  http://www.okanagan.bc.ca/

  • Teaching computer science courses including: MS Office Pro, application development, database development, design of business Information systems.         

10/1992 - 07/1994       Project Manager

KSS GmbH, Köln, Germany

  • Development Team Lead and project manger of a custom application development for the German steel industry. This was a $4 million software development project in cooperation with Siemens.
  • Responsible for a team of 6 developers using Oracle, Oracle Forms using Client Server Technology.
  • Responsible for the budget, milestones, software development and documentation. All milestones were bound to penalty payments, so meeting the deadlines was crucial.

Environment:     UNIX, Windows, Client-Server, Oracle, C, SQL, CASE Tool, OOP


04/1991 - 09/1992       Senior Systems Engineer

Sun Microsystems GmbH, Ratingen, Germany     http://www.sun.com/

  • Pre sales support for key accounts, e.g. GM, Toyota, Bayer, German Space Program etc.
  • Organization and Implementation of exhibitions and seminars
  • Product presentations
  • Specialist for Graphics and Multimedia
  • Responsible for test installations in competitions to IBM, DEC and HP in order to outperform the competitors. This involved the analysis of the requirements, hardware setup and configuration, consult with involved software vendors, e.g. Oracle and consult with internal and external specialists.
  • Manager for all demo equipment
  • Establishment of strategic alliances with software vendors

 

02/1984 - 01/1991       Chief Technology Officer

Marcus Computer Systeme GmbH, Meckenheim, Germany

  • Responsible for 3 departments: CAD/CAM Software development, Production Planning software development on AS/400 and Cobol, Customer support department
  • Responsible for up to 25 employees
  • Establishment of strategic alliances with suppliers, partner firms, universities
  • Assessment and selection of hardware and software suppliers
  • Responsible for the implementation and review of application development standards
  • Project manager for strategic projects
  • Lead architect for multiple technical applications for the CAD/CAM market

Environment:      UNIX, DOS, Windows, FORTRAN, Pascal, C, Assembler, Sybase, AS/400, COBOL


01/1983 - 12/1984       Programmer Analyst

University of Bonn, Institute of Social and Economic Sciences, Germany   http://www.uni-bonn.de

  • Implementation of Statistical algorithms using Fortran 77 for their research department
  • Implementation of an Interface to the IBM Operating System CP/CMS
  • Design and implementation of an Interactive Help System
  • Design and implementation of a syntax checker for the command line interface

Environment:                  IBM 370 with CP/CMS Operating System, FORTRAN 77.

 

1991 - 1994       Instructor

Elekluft GmbH, Training Center, Bonn, Germany

  • Courses for engineers: "Computer Integrated Manufacturing"


Education and Training

  • 1985: MSc in Mathematics and Computer science
  • 1990 - 1993: University courses in Economics and Marketing
  • 1990 & 1991: Project-Management
  • 1991: Sales Training
  • 1991: X-Windows programming
  • 1991: UNIX System-Administration
  • 1997: Microsoft NT4.0 System Administration
  • 1997: Microsoft Advanced VB Programming
  • 1997: Oracle V7 System Administration
  • 2008: Oracle 11g System Administration
  • 2008: VmWare VSP Certification

Personal

  • English and German fluently
  • Interests: Tennis, Snowboarding, Music, Traveling
  • References

 

Vodafone Global

Background:

Vodafone started in 2000 to migrate their Mainframe based Billing system to the newly acquired AMDOCS billing system. This was necessary due to a massive customer increase and the aquisition of subsidiaries worldwide. By 2006 the Amdocs system was handling an active customer base of 30 Million clients with approx. 100 Million CDR's per day. Until 2005 approx. 200 AMDOCS developers were on site implementing Vodafone specific features (beside many others in Israel and Cypress).

As part of the Migration-Team which is responsible for the release and version control of the AMDOCS system. This team was the link between AMDOCS development and the live production system.

 

Implementation of new software releases and special upgrades:

There were approx. 4 major software releases per year. Each release required approx. 2 month of preparation work. This involved the analysis of all the new features and identification of all their dependencies, e.g. database upgrades and conversions, hardware implications, downtime requirements for involved subsystems, etc. The most difficult part was to get time and resource commitments from participating departments. The result was a detailed project plan for the implementation which involved 200-300 high level tasks and up to 500 specialists from many departments. It also included a fallback plan, sanity checks and a Go/No-Go decision matrix.

As part of this team I performed all tasks required in this context to almost any detail level, which means:

  • communicating with AMDOCS project -and production manager as well as Vodafone management. Close contact to AMDOCS developer.
  • creation and visualization of the project plan and the project progress via Intranet
  • Installation and configuration of the AMDOCS software along with required system configuration
  • Monitoring the execution of the project plan and triggering specialists in case of errors

In addition I created many procedures and tools to organize and support those tasks.

 

Version control of Patches and Fixes

As the AMDOCS system had to be implemented very, very fast, it contained a lot of bugs and didn't contain all the required features. Therefore it was necessary to bring bug fixes and new features into production "on the fly". We were responsible to manage the implementation and version control process. This required formal procedures, e.g. signature validation of the production managers and the complete process of dependency checks as described for software releases - just on a smaller scale. The number of change requests per day could range from approx. 10 - 100.

Besides performing all these duties I developed a lot of production tools in order to automate and simplify these tasks - and generate management reports.

 

Implementation and maintenance of the operational environment

(Environment for managing batch applications)

Establish knowledge transfer between AMDOCS & Vodafone

All the describe duties allowed me to gather very deep and detailed knowledge of the AMDOCS system - even down to source code, script and DB level. In 2003 Vodafone started to take over the development and support of their billing system. Together with a Vodafone college I was chosen to start the knowledge transfer between AMDOCS and Vodafone. As my department decided to take over the Operational part of the AMDOCS system, we were trained by AMDOCS specialists (even from Israel) in this field and finally performed these duties under their supervision. This also involved all tasks during a full software release and day to day trouble shooting.

We documented all this knowledge and trained our colleges. This involved presentations of all AMDOCS components as well as the operational environment.

 

Test Environment

With all this knowledge I joined a group responsible for setting up test environments for new releases and special projects. This involved:

  • calculation of capacity needs for these tests
  • ordering the appropriate hardware,
  • supervising the installation of HW and OS
  • installation and configuration of all necessary AMDOCS and 3rd party software and transfer of required data snapshots from the production system into the test environment
  • close interaction with Test teams and developer to install fixes and reset the test-environment

As a special project within this group I started a documentation system to collect knowledge from all these sources and merge this into a Knowledge Database This was the beginning of a new career within Vodafone which I performed for the last 2 years.

 

Documentation and Productivity Portal

During 2000-2004 Vodafone mostly relied on AMDOCS developer and external consultants like me to handle their billing system. Therefore the majority of the knowledge was in external hands.  A strategic decision to take over the software development and phase out contracter over time fueled my role to transfer important knowledge out of peoples brain into a centralized knowledge repository. Together with a college I designed the database and a Web-based front end to collect, document and cross-reference this knowledge for the Migration-Team.

The next step was to create a Web-based information portal for the release management team to support their day to day work and streamline their workflow. This involved business analysis of all teams in this department and all related departments which were involved in the information flow. Unlike during the first phase at Vodafone this task required primarily interpersonal skills as we had to extract the core knowledge from colleges that secured their contracts. In addition we analysed the work-, information- and decision flow in order to re-design the business process and create supporting productivity tools. Needless to say that we faced a lot of resistance, but the Portal was built and a lot of structural changes were implemented.

 

Evaluation and Selection of EAI Tool

As a side project I was selected as a representative of my team to join a committee to select and evaluate an EAI tool for Vodafone.