Sean is available for hire
Hire SeanSean G. Jones
Verified Expert in Project Management
Project Manager
Location
Boise, ID, United States
Toptal Member Since
January 6, 2021
Sean was a developer for Hewlett-Packard (HP) before moving into management. Sean has worked as a manager, scrum master, and director for a number of companies including HP, Macys.com, Alertsense, and Ventive. Managing great teams, helping clients succeed, and bringing structure and process to projects is what Sean is passionate about and what drives him.
Project Highlights
Macys.com | Ruby/Cucumber Automated UI Test Framework
Led a team to select, design, pitch, implement, and rollout an automated UI test framework and strategy for the entire 25-team Macys.com organization.
Doubled the Number of Possible Emergency Notification Recipients
Led the team that increased the system capacity for our emergency notification system by a factor of seven, over a series of six spikes.
PromoSuite Plus Radio Station Management Application
Served as a project manager for the implementation, testing, and delivery of a suite of enterprise-level features for the successful PromoSuite application.
Expertise
Work Experience
Director of Engineering
2021 - 2022
Kaspien, Inc
- Joined the team as a contract product owner and scrum master. After organizing the entire technology department with scrum and establishing an end-to-end vision and roadmap, I was hired full-time and assumed leadership of the technology department.
- Owned the technology department, leading product, development, DevOps, IT, data, and BI teams.
- Improved production uptime to >99.9% through embedding quality in every role at every step.
- Led the team to reduce our monthly AWS costs by 40% through a focused, in-depth review and improvement process.
- Established end-to-end epic roadmaps for all stakeholder departments and engaged in regular executive-level planning and prioritization sessions.
- Led the technology division to be central to the operation of every department, working to understand how each department defined success, identifying primary challenges, and finding ways that technology could best change the course of their businesses.
Product Owner and Senior Scrum Master
2021 - 2021
Kaspien, Inc.
- Worked as a product owner for a core inventory management application. This was a cloud-based subscription service also used internally.
- Established and led the Scrum process for four product development teams.
- Advised and coached three product owners and a data scientist.
- Led an organizational shift to Agile Scrum: established Scrum, delivered Scrum training, set up stakeholder meetings, and established backlog grooming processes and cadence.
Director of Product Management
2019 - 2020
Ventive, LLC
- Oversaw the development of ten client web application projects and staff of 12 scrum masters and product owners.
- Led the organizational move from Waterfall to Agile; instituted Scrum and lean product development.
- Created the company onboarding structure, professional development plans, and one-on-ones for all employees.
- Established systemic quality improvements involving code reviews and multistage testing, test automation, and deployment testing.
Quality Consultant and Business Analyst
2018 - 2019
J.R. Simplot Company
- Identified, documented, and coordinated the execution of all requirements to upgrade six global company operations sites, including all laptops, network stacks, and firewalls. Sites were located in Mexico, China, Japan, South Korea, and Malaysia.
- Defined a plan to load test the SAP S/4HANA from our six global sites using JMeter and BlazeMeter. Led a team of three offshore developers to implement and execute the plan, confirming SAP S/4HANA instances' ability to perform under heavy usage.
- Worked with business users to record workflows and then created detailed user training. This training was then translated into five languages to train remote site personnel in the complex workflows within SAP S/4HANA.
Agile Project Manager
2017 - 2017
Konexus, LLC
- Served as the scrum master for three teams: DevOps, government features development, and quality engineering.
- Doubled the velocity of feature delivery for government clients by reducing the critical backlog and winning new contracts.
- Led a team to improve the system alerting recipient count max by 6x over seven sprints, achieving a max load of more than 200% of the largest customer recipient count.
- Spearheaded the company’s automated test strategy with the team achieving 100% coverage of all APIs, all check-ins unit tested prior to merging to trunk, and the development of robust UI test frameworks.
Quality Engineering Manager
2015 - 2017
Macys.com
- Defined and coordinated automated the testing strategy for 5-7 development teams in the domain.
- Defined and led a transformation within our domain that moved ownership of quality to development teams, optimized automated testing, and reduced release iterations from four to two weeks, doubling the numbers of releases per year to 26.
- Raised unit test coverage to over 85% across all teams.
- Coordinated the release testing activities for the organization for four release cycles.
- Served in a liaison role between release engineering, business, development, and QA teams across 25 teams to bring features and changes to release quality on time for launch.
Quality Assurance Automation Development Manager
2014 - 2015
Macys.com
- Managed the test automation development team delivering automation framework and reporting solutions for the QE organization.
- Led a team to deliver an automated web UI test framework which scaled to six sections, 25 teams, and over 8,000 tests that ran daily via Jenkins on multiple operating systems, browsers, and platforms (desktop, tablet, phone).
- Led a team to deliver an automated web-based, real-time quality metrics dashboard that saved over 100 hours per week previously spent manually collecting, analyzing, and reporting results. The results were archived for over three years.
- Oversaw the team that implemented the continuous integration pipeline to enforce a base level of quality for all commits, gating all development work through multi-stage automated testing.
Project Manager
2010 - 2014
Hewlett-Packard
- Managed web services, digital send, and copy development teams.
- Turned around two distressed teams and obtained leading results.
- Offshored the web services subsystem ownership after the onshore team achieved excellent efficiency gains.
Project History
Macys.com | Ruby/Cucumber Automated UI Test Framework
Led a team to select, design, pitch, implement, and rollout an automated UI test framework and strategy for the entire 25-team Macys.com organization.
All the UI testing had been done manually at Macys.com, requiring massive time and money for unrepeatable results. My team researched the best available technologies, designed a solution, got it approved by the organization, and over the course of 13 months, we had automated the testing for the entire macys.com site for 25 teams.
We doubled the number of releases macys.com could deliver in a year without increasing the cost of the QA organization.
We doubled the number of releases macys.com could deliver in a year without increasing the cost of the QA organization.
Doubled the Number of Possible Emergency Notification Recipients
Led the team that increased the system capacity for our emergency notification system by a factor of seven, over a series of six spikes.
Our company's emergency alerting application sent emails, text messages, and phone calls to large sets of recipients during emergencies. Our clients were primarily colleges, cities, and state governments. Our system would bottleneck or fail under sufficiently large alerting "campaigns." To gain larger clients we needed to double our possible alerting campaign size.
We set up the following cycle:
1. Closely monitor the system
2. Load test until system failure
3. Analyze the root cause of the system failure
4. Design and implement a fix for the system's weak point
5. Repeat
Over six iterations of this cycle, the team delivered improvements that increased capacity by seven times, far exceeding the goal.
We set up the following cycle:
1. Closely monitor the system
2. Load test until system failure
3. Analyze the root cause of the system failure
4. Design and implement a fix for the system's weak point
5. Repeat
Over six iterations of this cycle, the team delivered improvements that increased capacity by seven times, far exceeding the goal.
PromoSuite Plus Radio Station Management Application
https://promosuite.com/Served as a project manager for the implementation, testing, and delivery of a suite of enterprise-level features for the successful PromoSuite application.
I managed the team that implemented, tested, and delivered enterprise-level features for the Promosuite Plus web and mobile application for radio station management. The features include advertising spot writing, voice talent, reviewing, approving, scheduling, and distribution, digital ad creation, and promotion event staffing, coordination, and scheduling.
Education
1992 - 1996
Bachelor of Science Degree in Computer Science
University of Idaho - Moscow, ID, USA
Certifications
JANUARY 2018 - JANUARY 2023
Certified Scrum Master
Scrum Alliance
Collaboration That Works
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