Biography
Maryrose has a
30+ year IT career,
the last 15, in leadership roles in multi-billion $ companies. In addition, she also has 18 years hand-on experience in various IT roles ranging from developer, systems analyst, data modeler, information architect, enterprise architect and project manager. Click here to see early career detail. She brings operating expertise from various development environments and platforms covering legacy mainframe, GUI/Client Server and various web platforms of .com businesses. Her program/project management expertise covers traditional waterfall, SAFe/AGILE and hybrid versions combining both. Pragmatic best describes her approach to problem solving.
Journey into IT
Maryrose received her Bachelor of Science degree, major in Mathematics, from the University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City, Philippines. She began her IT career in 1981 as a programmer for the San Miguel Corporation in the Philippines. She continued in IT with the original intent to eventually move to a career in Actuarial Sciences.
To support that goal, she opted to immerse herself in the insurance business, first working for Lincoln Philippine Life Insurance Company in the Philippines, followed by a 10-year employment stint with Transamerica Occidental Life Insurance Company in Los Angeles, California after moving to the US in 1984.
Having enjoyed a successful growing IT career and gaining business expertise in the insurance industry, Maryrose was recruited to participate in the development of the $2Million project replacing a major Reinsurance administration application at Transamerica as subject matter expert. She converted to consultant status when the company moved its headquarters to Kansas City, Missouri and Maryrose opted out of a relocation. The development platform used for this new application was a 4th generation language tool called IEF. In the course of the project, Maryrose developed an expertise in the toolset which led to a string of consultancy jobs with different clients such as the State of Kansas, Kaiser Permanente, Ecolab, Lincoln National Life Insurance Co., the US Department of Defense and Target Corporation. Still based in Los Angeles, California, Maryrose started her life as road warrior, commuting to her client sites across the country to provide consulting services.
Target Corporation
In 1997, Maryrose began her career at Target Corporation, starting off as consultant/expert for IEF in the Development Technologies group, then taking on various roles in the support, planning, implementation and administration for IEF at Target. She provided in-house consultation on this tool that accounted for 75% of all Target legacy applications at the time. Her responsibilities included vendor management, upgrade strategic planning, data management and architecture planning. Maryrose spearheaded the development of the first enterprise model management strategy for IEF at Target.
Among Maryrose’s achievements at the time were saving Target the $500K/year maintenance fee for IEF by supporting her manager’s outsource initiative, creating savings by developing a plan to integrate the IEF toolset infrastructure across the three operating companies to allow it to operate at a lower headcount, and representing IEF in the integration effort for Mervyn’s, Target, Marshall Fields and Hudsons after the acquisition. In 2000, Maryrose took on an FTE role at Target as manager in the eCommerce group and officially moved to Minneapolis, MN. She saved target.com development $$$ by streamlining the source and version control process for all .com development collateral.
Not long into that job, she was again recruited to do rescue project management on the ailing effort implementing Web Analytics for target.com. Her work on this project allowed Target management to have a proactive view of target.com trends enabling adjustments to increase sales. She saved Target the $2Million dollar investment by successfully implementing Accrue. The project allowed target.com to increase revenue by optimizing interactive campaign management, view customer site visit habits and customize the site according to customer buying trends. By this time, Maryrose had established a solid reputation for turning around disasters into success stories.
She was recruited to join the Direct2Guest project, a project to replace the Warehouse Management system for Marshall Fields’ lucrative furniture business. Her role was to integrate the development efforts into a cohesive and seamless application, convert all data from the legacy applications and perform all quality assurance efforts. The challenge, as in most endeavors, was budget and timing. Maryrose worked around this problem successfully, creating procedure that enabled successful offshore outsourcing of the QA function. The result was a successful, on-time rollout. At about that opportune time, news of the May Company acquisition of Marshall Fields became official. Maryrose stepped up to the new task at hand. She was retained as the one-man lead for the effort to transition Marshall Fields supply systems over to May Co. She also took over support for Marshall Fields eCommerce through this transition.
SEAGATE TechNology
In 2005, Maryrose joined Seagate Sales and Marketing IT. She introduced her enterprise infrastructure skills into the new job, making fixed-bid outsourcing work for Seagate by creating processes and procedures and identifying milestone checks to ensure QA throughout the development cycle. She took on more in the Mergers and Acquisitions space by integrating Maxtor into Seagate for Sales & Marketing IT, after the acquisition. To add on to an already strong skill set, Maryrose was sent to Business Excellence training to earn her LEAN/Six Sigma Black belt. In 2007, Maryrose was selected to go to Seagate’s annual event in New Zealand, 2008 Eco Seagate, to experience team-building at its best — via an adventure race hosted annually for 200 of Seagate’s employees. This event was the ultimate test of one’s physical limitations in a team setting. See the following article to get a feel for what this event was about:
http://archive.fortune.com/2008/05/20/technology/obrien_seagate.fortune/index.htm
BEST BUY
By 2008, Maryrose was yearning for bigger things. She took the challenge moving back into consultancy and accepting a contract with client Best Buy. At Best Buy, she was program manager for the Site Management group, part of the .com center of excellence, loaned out to various groups in .com to plan and strategize rollout for efforts such as the Best Buy Kiosk Strategy, .com Change Management, Site Change Process Improvement, Store Location Information Management, Best Buy Web 2.0 Strategy, Holiday QA, all projects using a Six Sigma Approach.
PRIME THERAPUTICS
The next challenge was a Prime Therapeutics gig. For Prime, Maryrose identified process improvement opportunities for the senior management of the Information Management (IM) group. Her charge was to identify and prioritize the opportunities with the management team, develop/document a repeatable process and train the IM team to execute this new process, all in the context of LEAN/Six Sigma, ITIL and COBIT. She developed material to support this effort at the conclusion of her tour of duty with Prime. Out of this assignment came the idea of communicating this process to the rest of the world.
SIX SIGMA and IT
Part of the communication process was conceptualizing the new message. The first publication of parts of this message was via a blog. Click here to link to Maryrose’s blog on this process. She was also published at PEX network for an article on process improvement: http://www.processexcellencenetwork.com/lean-six-sigma-business-transformation/articles/how-do-you-align-the-customer-experience-with-proc.
The follow-up message was first publicly communicated via a podcast published by SixSigmaIQ.
AMERIPRISE BANK
After a brief sabbatical preparing material from professional experiences up to this point, Maryrose took a non-IT, program management consulting assignment to primarily move Ameriprise Bank from its headquarters in New York to it new home in Minneapolis. She brought new structure and process to this program execution that it allowed her to work on 9 other projects during this three month stint at Ameriprise. Her responsibilities included defining what it took to move the bank from the regulatory and compliance standpoint and managing the execution across all areas of the Ameriprise organization.
COMPUCOM
While between assignments, Maryrose took an interim role supporting Compucom’s effort in creating an IT asset management strategy for client Target. This was a short consulting assignment that was forced short due to an extended assignment for another major client.
WELLS FARGO BANK
The next assignment in the pipeline was an extended stint for Wells Fargo doing program management for the Wachovia Integration effort for Debit Card, which was a natural transition for Maryrose, now given the banking background and serious integration experience. This assignment was about infusing organization to an integration effort that crossed many functions in the bank.
ARC SUPPRESSION TECHNOLOGIES
At her career crossroads and in her search for the compleat career high point, Maryrose tapped partner Reinhold’s intellectual property portfolio for the perfect business opportunity with the goal of developing her perfect job. The idea was to take a product to market and establish a business entity. That product was identified. Reinhold’s innovation brought in the birth of Arc Suppression Technologies. Together with another partner, Bob Thorbus, Arc Suppression Technologies was born. This venture took a unique and state-of-the-art hardware technology that Reinhold developed and patented, and commercialize it. Click on this link to learn more about Arc Suppression Technologies. Reinhold, Maryrose and Bob intend to bring Arc Suppression Technologies to a new forefront and ultimately define perfect jobs for themselves.
SETTLING DOWN WITH WHAT SHE KNOWS BEST
Since the inception of Arc Suppression Technologies, Maryrose’s life strategy has changed. She has decided to step back into a less active role with AST and continue with her information technology career. Consulting for various high-profile, efficiency-sensitive projects as project/program manager at client United Health Group, Maryrose has moved out to Arizona. The move is, by no means, a step down from a high-visibility career as Maryrose’s UHG projects are high-visibility and demanding. It is just gravitating to her professional strength and existing reputation.
BACK TO MINNESOTA
As the 7-year run at UHG came to an end, an opportunity at HealthPartners brings Maryrose back to Minnesota, on a commuting basis. The new assignment leveraged Maryrose’s healthcare background and vendor management skills. These gigs were in the Claims and Utilization Management space, using software from vendors McKesson (now Change Healthcare) and RedHat (IBM). Another initiative that Maryrose also managed at HealthPartners is the tactical execution of the Artifical Intelligence (AI) program from a senior leader’s vision, drawing out the prioritized Use Cases and organizing the Vendor Selection activity.
After a brief relocation to Arizona...
Maryrose is back home, in Minnesota. Now a full-fledged empty-nester, with successful daughters, professionals in their own right and moved on with their own robust lives, Maryrose takes on a more mobile lifestyle. She took on life living in Uptown Minneapolis, in a high-rise by the Lake Calhoun area. This setting was perfect, as she took on a full telecommuting assignment with Toppan Merrill Corporation. This was a 6-month assignment managing a team of communication specialists developing compliance documentation for health plans for Toppan clients in a very aggressive timeline.
This assignment was followed by a project with CITGO Petroleum, installing SAP add-on software OPEN TEXT Vendor Invoice Management. For this assignment, Maryrose did part-time travel to Houston for this client. This was another challenging assignment, as the software was not in Maryrose’s development portfolio. But, project management process, as it is, is translatable to any niche. So, after two months of organizing the project, Maryrose continued to drive remotely, but moved on to another full-time gig.
This next gig was with Element Fleet Management, where Maryrose was a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt/Project Manager supporting the Billing Business area. Success continues to follow Maryrose as she tackles the front-end process of incepting projects that further the Transformation initiative, prompted by acquisition of a substantial client set that looks to expand the Element business significantly.
As the Element assignment drew to its closure, Maryrose jumped back into consulting in the Healthcare space, taking an assignment as Engagement Manager for Change Healthcare, the software she managed implementation for at HealthPartners in a prior stint. The experience gave Maryrose an even deeper information base on Claims.
As she settled back into consulting, she joined Safenet Consulting fulltime, where she handled multiple projects across multiple clients including HealthPartners (for an artificial intelligence project), Culvers as scrum master/project manager, Sargento as Six Sigma Black Belt/Project Manager, Proex, among them.
Next in the pipeline was RSM US LLP, where she tackled infrastructure projects until she circled back to Healthcare, at Blue Cross Blue Shield MN, where she managed business projects in the Medical Management business area of the Medicaid Operating Model Transition project. The challenge was to be able to move projects forward in an environment that was neither pure Agile nor waterfall, but, with the stakeholders desiring to eventually transition to Agile.
