Paul Schechinger

I was a major part of the leadership team, which did a complete waterfall to agile (scrum) transition of Cisco's Contact Center business unit, and comprised over 500 engineers worldwide. I was the development manager for the SocialMiner product, which was the first to undergo the transition, and set the baseline for the rest of the BU teams to follow. A major contributor to this transition's success was the switch to a servant-leader mentality, in which the leadership team "works" for the engineers to enable them to be as productive as possible. It is impossible in this space to capture the entirety of what the agile transition took. Still, the results were outstanding, with a 5x increase in team productivity, vast quality improvements (from >1800 to <100 open defects), and substantial improvements in employee and customer satisfaction.

I was the executive leader for the New Delhi-based 50-person team of engineers, managers, scrum master, and product owner who built this product from the ground up. The software was delivered to specifications and quality criteria that I had established. I was closely involved during the entire development cycle, including software architecture, quality criteria, and program management. I was able to develop a close rapport with the team, which enabled a relationship of trust and transparency, which can be challenging to achieve with outsourcers. The product was written primarily in Java and AngularJS.

Took over leadership of the development team in August with the directive to deliver Finesse by December. Worked with the team to define an aggressive but achievable project plan, which we then implemented, resulting in on-time delivery of the product while meeting stringent quality criteria. Under my leadership, the team also successfully delivered several subsequent feature releases based on customer requirements. The team was split between Boston and California, and we successfully implemented a working model to maximize our productivity and minimize the challenges of a geographically dispersed team. The Finesse back end was written in Java and the web interface in JavaScript.

Led a bi-coastal team of ten engineers to create a new services-oriented architecture to provide an interface to social media platforms (Facebook and Twitter) within Cisco's Contact Center suite of products. Worked with the software architect to design the product's architecture, and created a development plan which enabled a working prototype to be delivered within four months. Subsequent to that, developed the project plan to adapt the architecture to be the Social Media interface to Cisco's Contact Center CCX and CCE products. The code was primarily written in Java.

Perimeter Technology was a single product company with an aging reporting platform. As CTO, I developed new software architecture and managed and grew the software development team, which rewrote the product and implemented the new architecture. While playing a substantial hands-on role as coder and architect, I also performed all project management and engineering leadership duties to release and maintain the new product successfully. The updated product and added features enabled Perimeter Technology to remain a viable business. In addition to leading the engineering department, I was the program manager for all releases of all of Perimeter Technology's products during my tenure as CTO.

The Contact Center Enterprise (CCE) platform was roughly ten million lines of code, written originally in C++, and then augmented with Java. A large part of my role as the software development manager was to make sure that my teams met all of the feature, fix, and quality requirements and delivered on time. During my tenure at Cisco, there were ten major releases of CCE, and the quality and content of successive releases increased, especially after we transitioned from waterfall to agile/scrum. There were multiple times for which I was the program manager for the entire release, comprising numerous development teams, with a total in excess of 100 engineers. It was my responsibility to manage all dependencies, report on status, and maintain and adjust the program plan to ensure successful releases.

7730120 – Set-Top Box Initiated Contact Center Interaction
9088658 – Intelligent Overload Control for Contact Center
7729277 – Intelligent Directed Broadcast In Contact Center Solutions
9135668 – Contact Center Routing Using Characteristic Mapping
5426634 – Flexible Call-Processing Apparatus for ISDN Telephone Channels