Resume

Matthew Alverson

Problem Solver and Team Builder

Photographer Cat Dyson has over 20 years of experience in the photography trade. With an eye towards capturing the magic of the moment, she’s developed techniques that let her slide unnoticed into her client’s comfort zones.

In addition to special event and family portraiture, Ms. Dyson has an extensive background in art photography, capturing images that have won her accolades and awards at a variety of art competitions over the years.

Background

I have 20 years of experience in all aspects of Information Technology concentrated mostly in highly regulated sectors.  Understanding the business I am supporting is key to my success. For the past two and a half years I have lead a team of developers from project inception through several releases of an enterprise-level construction project management and cost accounting solution targeting companies with annual revenue of $30+ million. My professional strength lies in managing diverse IT teams involved in multiple projects.  I thrive on the variety and pace this type of environment provides. I have worked in all areas of IT including development, hardware, servers, storage, and virtualization. My personal strength is solving complex problems, thus my passion for development. I enjoy analyzing data using my knowledge of databases, statistics, and Six Sigma to present information to business unit leaders in a way that helps them make decisions and run their units more successfully.

Education And Professional Development

  • The University of North Carolina at Asheville B.A. in Economics 1995
  • Microsoft Certified Trainer (2002 – 2003)
  • Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer
  • Sage X3 ERP Certified Developer
  • Oracle Certified Professional
  • VSLIVE Conference
  • Six Sigma Green Belt

Employment History

{SAW} Software Mill

Senior Software Engineer; Team Lead

6/2015 — 10/2018

  • Lead an agile development team from inception through five releases of an enterprise-level construction project management and cost accounting system.  Lead the teams focused on accounting, treasury, cash flow management, project management, and cost accrual.
  • Interviewed subject matter experts to determine requirements.  Documented and decomposed requirements into manageable units of work (stories) for developers.  Documented the design decisions and conditions of satisfaction that impacted the stories. 
  • Served as an architect for the product.
  • Responsible for the management of the team’s backlog.  Made sure stories got estimated and the priority of each story was adjusted based on market research.
  • Trained all new developers in both development and agile project management methodologies.
  • Guided the team through bi-weekly sprint reviews, sprint planning sessions, and team retrospectives.
  • At SAW we made a practice of hiring interns, recent graduates, and veterans looking to start their software development careers.  I mentored these individuals in career development, software engineering, and leadership.
  • Trained sales and end-users on all features of the product.
  • Managed Jira backlog; designed and implemented workflows to improve the flow of an idea through decomposition, design review, estimation, implementation, peer review, lead review, and product owner signoff.
  • Performed code reviews and acceptance testing of all work performed by the team.
  • Screened and interviewed applicants.
  • Implemented a test-driven development process which included continuous testing.
  • As a side project to make the construction product a viable solution in the UK, I researched regulations published by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs Service (HMRC) regarding the withholding of taxes from contracted workers. I then lead a small team through designing an automated integration between Sage X3 ERP’s supplier, invoicing, and payment modules to check the withholding rate of the supplier with HMRC, withhold the appropriate amount, and file electronic returns with HMRC.

Consultant

Interim Director of Information Technology

2/16/2015 — 5/15/2015

  • Contracted to develop an IT roadmap and mentor an in-house candidate for promotion into IT director position.  Worked closely with this candidate on IT planning, project management, standards, and staff development.
  • Developed 18 month IT roadmap which included: projects to add source control, change control and software development lifecycle to the development process; server consolidation and retirement; Server 2003 elimination; Exchange 2013 upgrade; network infrastructure upgrade; security reviews; development projects; improve IT support, etc.
  • Implemented off-site backups with Barracuda 990 backup solution.  Prior to this servers were being backed-up to a local device within the same server rack.
  • Initiated and oversaw the project to double the hardware resources of the VMWare cluster.  This cluster was supporting 100 VMs and running at 90+% memory and processor utilization.  After adding additional hosts to the cluster, each host was then operating between 30 and 40% utilization, thus providing the necessary excess capacity for the annual spike in volume of the cyclical business units.
  • Reorganized the IT staff to reduce knowledge silos.  Identified issues with the way the offshore team was being managed and laid out plans for bringing them more in line with the local IT staff and standards.
  • Implemented WSUS allowing for the controlled patching of servers and workstations.  Security patches up to this point had never been installed on servers.  This brought the server patching current from a two-year backlog of patching.
  • Lead an interdepartmental team to review the customer on-boarding process and initiate improvements.
  • Implemented ManageEngine ServiceDesk IT helpdesk solution.  This gave visibility into the amount of support work each staff member was doing, individual response times, backlogs, and customer satisfaction metrics.
  • Developed a plan for file server consolidation onto Windows Server 2012.  This plan provided for improving directory structures, improving file security, and reducing duplicate files.  Included in the plan was the build-out of a new server, seeding of existing data, directory structure and permissions, cut-over and decommissioning plans for eight file servers, and numerous other shares.
  • Developed a plan for reducing the number of web servers from over 25 to 10.

First-Citizens Bank & Trust Company 

Senior Vice President

10/30/1995 — 11/17/2014

Mortgage Operations Manager

7/1/2013 — 11/17/2014

 

  • Assumed position as interim Operations Manager tasked with eliminating the backlog of mortgage applications not processed.  Was named Operations Manager after a short period due to producing immediate results.
  • Implemented process redesign which moved the percentage of mortgage applications that had a credit decision within 14 days from 10% to 80%; cut overall turn-times by 20 days and improved customer survey results by 13 percentage points.
  • Opened a remote processing site in order to expand the pool of potential candidates for open positions and provide redundancy for business continuity purposes.
  • Oversaw risk management issues related to customer and employee security, fraud and theft.
  • Managed a $5.5 million budget and a staff of 40, which included operations supervisors, mortgage underwriters and mortgage processors.

Mortgage Information Systems Manager

1/1/2004 — 6/30/2013

 

  • Implemented a direct to consumer web-based mortgage application platform.  This required coordinating with the marketing department and operations to promote the site and improve search engine optimization.
  • Oversaw the design of a system framework to manage all in-house developed interfaces to third party processors (i.e. B2B integrations).  This provided a consistent implementation of all current and future interfaces; consistent tracking, logging and troubleshooting; and easy insertion of interfaces into the workflow. Tools used in this project: VB.net, C#, Oracle, and SQL Server.
  • Managed the successful implementation of a new core system requiring the re-coding of all interfaces, intranet projects, and services that interacted with the core system.  Managed vendors, contract programmers, staff programmers, testing teams, and system administrators.  Migrated data from Oracle to Microsoft SQL Server using SQL Server Migration Assistant.
  • Oversaw division’s server/storage implementations, support, and maintenance.  When I started managing this group there was a single environment (production).  I built out a new production environment with more redundancy, added a UAT and QA environment.  This reduced the frequency and length of production outages as well as improved the quality of in-house developed applications going into the production environment.
  • Vendor management: selected vendors, performed due diligence, negotiated contracts, and maintained relationships with representatives.
  • Information Security:  Hardened all in-house developed applications to meet information security standards of the company; using NTFS, SSL, Active Directory, Windows authentication, and forms authentication.  Performed quarterly user access audits of all systems to ensure the appropriate access levels were granted to the correct users.
  • Managed the software development life cycle using both the waterfall and Agile methods. 
  • Oversaw and audited change management procedures; including attending and presenting at Change Advisory Board meetings, overseeing/performing QA, user acceptance testing (UAT) and production deployments, and ensuring appropriate documentation was completed for audit trail.
  • Managed a $3 million budget and a staff of eight programmers, support specialists, and project managers.

Programmer/Analyst                                                  

1/1/2001 — 1/1/2004

 

  • Developed product and pricing engine which eliminated hand pricing of each loan request, thus automating the distribution of daily rate sheets. This implementation reduced the number of pricing errors resulting in over $10,000 in monthly savings.  Tools used in this project:  VB.net, C#,  ASP.net, and ADO.net.
  • Developed an intranet reporting site that provided live reporting of pipelines and eliminated the need for the weekly distribution of paper reports.  Tools used in this project:  VB.net, C#, ASP.net, ADO.net, AJAX, and JQuery.
  • Developed B2B integrations to third party processors which streamlined placing orders thus eliminating the rekeying of data between systems and reducing human error.  Tools used in these projects included VB.net, C#, and WinForms.
  • From the systems support specialist position, I carried the responsibilities for database administration which included patching the RDBMS software and operating system, performing backups and restorations, query optimization, index creation and maintenance, and space allocation.

Other Roles

  • Systems Support Specialist  1/1/1998 — 1/1/2001
  • Document Review / Rate Desk Specialist / Secondary Marketing  1/1/1995 — 1/1/1998

VOLUNTEER/COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT

 

  • Youth Soccer Coach
  • Soccer Referee
  • Mentor for Henderson County Robotics Team at the Boys and Girls Club of Henderson County