Alvaro Villena

Acting as an interim e-learning manager, my responsibilities included:

• Managing multiple e-course development projects
• Defining scope and coordinating instructional design activities and vendor technology development
• Identifying and coordinating with instructional design vendors
• Providing overall project management support for e-courses
• Providing expert advice and feedback on the design and development of e-courses
• Holding weekly review meetings with vendors and internal team members
• Providing weekly status reports on projects to the publisher and other designated team members
• Leading the development and launching of 6-8 e-courses in a quarter
• Editing courses and loading them into the platform
• Coordinating with the team in India

I acted with independent thinking and as someone who proved to be comfortable being proactive, making decisions while keeping stakeholder needs in mind.

Managed the transformation of the customer training process, which was implemented through traditional approaches (20 people personal training in classrooms), into a digital e-learning self-paced platform.

Led a multidisciplinary team of 5+ content creators, developers, and customer service representatives to design and implement courses.

Led a 6+ person team in implementing innovation methodologies, aiming to identify new business opportunities and develop operation solutions, achieving operational time improvements of 200%, enabling new customer acquisition and business models.

Trained business and operation representatives in innovation processes and methodologies, resulting in institutionalized innovation standards. The implemented procedure consisted of a 4-stage innovation process based on the design thinking methodology. The stages were: business challenges exploration, solution ideation, prototyping and testing, and solution implementation.

Guided a newly formed team of nine developers, one business analyst, and a product owner into adopting the scrum development framework plus other practices from Kanban and extreme programming (XP) with E2E ownership of the product involving architecture and infrastructure design and implementation, software development, QA testing, deployment (continuous integration and continuous delivery) and operation.
Technologies used included Jira, Google Cloud Platform, Bamboo, Kubernetes Engine, Angular, Selenium, and microservices architecture (Spring Boot). Implemented pilot technologies for the organization: cloud infrastructure, continuous integration pipelines, and microservices architecture. Coached team members into performance improvement through 1:1 sessions, continuous feedback, and goal management.

Led a multidisciplinary team of 9+ people from business (revenue, pricing, and distribution) and technology units (digital, development, IT business continuity, and operation research) in identifying errors in the availability systems, adopting short-term fixes and implementing long-term solutions to improve the system's overall efficiency.

I successfully managed a complex project for a financial service, improving their day-to-day operations.

Some of the key achievements in this project include:

Proficient use of Asana, demonstrating expertise in the Asana project management software and effectively managing all aspects of the project.

Mentorship and coaching, acting as a mentor and coach to the organization, helping to transform the mindset and setting the structure required to prepare the organization for new projects.

Status reporting, consistently keeping the organization's senior officials informed of the project status through regular status reports and meetings.

Project documentation, maintaining accurate project documentation and follow-up systems, mainly Jira, to ensure the project was properly tracked and recorded.

Instrumental in team development, removing roadblocks to the team's work, mentoring the team, and utilizing organizational resources to improve their capacity for project work.

High-quality work, encouraging a sustainable pace with a high level of quality for the team, ensuring that the project was delivered on time and to the client's satisfaction.

Successfully improved the utilization of Wrike and coached the project team on its full advantages.

Effectively led the team on various responsibilities, including planning, scheduling, and managing all aspects of the project. Maintained status reports, compiled historical data, and presented status reports to senior officials.

Assisted in team development and empowerment, promoting meaningful contributions from each team member.

Showed strong experience in fast-paced software development with Agile (scrum) and Wrike proficiency.

With excellent analytical skills and attention to detail, drove continuous improvement throughout the project lifecycle.

Also led the project team to execute various tasks, including project planning, scheduling, coordination, and management.

Contributed to the project's success with solid experience with Wrike and project management, excellent analytical skills, and attention to detail.

Also praised for my strong communication skills and ability to respond to rapidly changing situations with flexibility and rigorous attention to detail.

Demonstrated experience in implementing Agile methodologies, specifically the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe).

Developed and implemented an agility assessment tool to evaluate the performance levels of product development teams and create improvement plans.

Assisted a forest manufacturing industry corporate client in setting up program management structures using SAFe to manage multiple agile teams.

Facilitated agile implementation within leadership teams to ensure sustained transformation across teams and departments.

Additionally, I led process improvement initiatives to increase team and product development velocity.

Developed an AI-powered online proctoring solution for a cheat-free learning environment by:

• Creating an industry benchmark of existing solutions
• Preparing technical specifications
• Estimating timeline and cost with development
• Validating key initial decisions with stakeholders
• Managing a team of developers and designers to develop the MVP
• Overseeing the product development

The client, a learning platform focused on the Asian market, aimed to expand the platform's capabilities, including AI-driven proctoring and other features.

I assessed existing information for the upcoming major release, prioritized features, and oversaw development.

Under my leadership, an AI-driven SaaS platform was crafted to facilitate account analysts in evaluating nexus taxes based on varying state regulations.

The platform's primary challenge was to calculate exposure to nexus taxes, taking into account the differing regulations and thresholds set by each state.

Client-owned and operated a data analytics platform implementation company that was in business for over a year.

Completed an organization assessment and proposed a structure for product development, team management, and running client projects.

Managed a team of three data engineers, one data analyst, and one data analyst intern and expanded with a few developers.

Coached the CEO of the company in agile and product management best practices.

Oversaw the development of an MVP, launching it to market in four months.

Alvaro served as the Scrum Master for a groundbreaking AI project at an Airline company. The objective was to develop an internal tool leveraging AI to optimize revenue strategy.

This innovative tool collected input from revenue analysts and processed it using advanced AI algorithms to suggest and implement the best pricing and availability strategies.

Alvaro's expertise in Scrum methodologies and his deep understanding of AI technologies played a pivotal role in guiding the development team through the successful implementation of the tool.

His leadership and collaboration skills ensured effective communication between stakeholders, developers, and analysts, delivering a cutting-edge tool that significantly improved revenue optimization for the airline company.