Alan M. Marcum

Summary

Extensive experience as a manager and computer science professional, with emphasis on combining technology with a focus on the customer. Effective team builder and leader; proven skills in:

Experience

Lead forensic and escalation engineering for Cisco ASA family, FWSM, and CSM product lines. Team is responsible for providing engineering support on highly escalated customer issues.

• Responsible for staffing (hiring, firing, performance appraisal and improvement, goal setting), new-hire training and integration, and implementation of team's strategic product improvement goals.
• Improved relationship with worldwide Technical Support teams, directly and indirectly.
• Hired and successfully trained and integrated first new college graduate in team's decade-plus history.
• Expanded team to Boxborough, Massachusetts and Austin, Texas.

Resolve critical customer satisfaction issues throughout the company. Improve cross-functional operational processes to decrease customer-related escalations, improve responsiveness to escalated situation, and improve customer satisfaction.

Oversaw product maintenance, content and production of regular and special service packs, and customer escalations from Technical Support into Engineering.

• Improved efficiency and decreased staffing levels 10-15% while increasing service and responsiveness to customers
• Increased number of customer-specific service packs and improved relationships with Technical Support while maintaining on-time delivery record for regular service packs, support up to five different CD releases and an on-demand SaaS release simultaneously.
• Determined staffing level required for rotating team.
• Determined policies for improving use of offshore engineering in Sustaining role.

Revamped high-end technical support products, with focus on architecture, scope of support, customer and internal FAQs, procedures, and processes. General scopes of support range from installation through heterogeneous network configuration and administration, custom development, professional video tools, etc.

Led development team building high-availability and file replication software; responsible for release content and schedules. Worked with Product Marketing to specify feature content and priorities. Scheduled, tracked progress, and made final readiness decisions for three releases. Team in Mountain View and San Diego.

• Delivered three releases on time, making feature-schedule tradeoffs when necessary.
• Scheduled and led effort to port software from Solaris to Linux.
• Managed team's involvement in sales efforts and in responses to custom work requests.
• Began building technical support team.
• Increased team from 4½ people to 9.

Held primary corporate responsibility for quality and completeness of editorial data; liaison with MSN's Editorial Team. Implemented policies for approving applications for product. Extensive collaboration with Legal, Editorial, Business Development, and Product Definition teams on policy issues.

• Defined and adapted approval polices for new products; developed and delivered training programs for internal and external use on implementing policies, both in the US and in non-US markets (Europe, Asia, Latin America). Required for successful new product launch.
• Developed methods for evaluating compliance of proposed sales to policies, and for applying policies uniformly, improving accuracy and consistency, and decreasing customer complaints 50%.
• Built and led data review teams, processing over 50,000 Keywords in one project, over 500,000 in another. Forecasted and scheduled projects accurately; completed under budget. Allowed company to deploy new products and to expand to Europe, Asia, and Latin America.
• Specified, scheduled, and managed release and maintenance of tool suite used by Keyword Review and Customer Service teams, on time, with required functionality.
• Responded effectively to developing crisis with Corporate Sales by listening, proposing, selling, and implementing effective solution. Retained trust of Sales; enhanced employee job satisfaction.
• Restructured department, clarifying responsibilities, increasing focus, responsiveness, quality, and job satisfaction, and providing career path options. Expanded team from eight to fifteen; decreased training time 20% while improving consistency.

• Consulted with sales reps and customers selling and using Internet Keywords.
• Ensured understanding by customers in choice and promotion of Internet Keywords, increasing customer satisfaction, use of product, and sales.
• Wrote technical white paper on the architecture of the Keyword Resolution System.
• Analyzed usage trends, and built tools to allow others to analyze summaries of those trends. Tools (written in perl and SQL) facilitated increase of 15% in number of Keywords proposed to customers.
• Created proposal template, standardizing engagements and decreasing time to write proposals 25%.

Led technical arm of the regional sales force, which built demonstrations and proofs-of-concept, assisted with prototypes, and gave technical presentations.

• Developed and delivered product presentations in 7-city regional product tour.
• Ensured relationships between SEs and Sales Managers were appropriate and productive. Worked with Regional Sales Manager to ensure adherence to business plan.

Managed and was technical leader of team delivering relationship-based enterprise networking support.

• Managed nine senior support engineers, increasing team's job satisfaction through additional attention.
• Primary support engineer for a very large and influential customer.
• Mentored two transfers from front-line support team, improving technical and account management skills, increasing their effectiveness 30%.
• Contributed to decisions of department management, including product definition and pricing, department architecture and strategies, staffing, training, budgeting, and contract negotiation.

Helped evolve business unit from non-revenue hotline to profit-and-loss full-service business, including hotline, on-site, and relationship-based support.

• Defined and implemented the model for high-end enterprise support offering.
• Primary support contact for several of the largest, most important, influential customers. Recognized as critical to success of relationships by all levels of management and by customers.
• Developed and delivered advanced course on internal operations of the NetInfo system and network administration service. Class received uniformly excellent reviews from students.
• Identified need for, designed, implemented (in C) 80% of functions, integrated, tested, documented, and distributed extensive patch for better performance and management of very large networks.
• Wrote numerous articles for NeXT's technical journals; provided technical editing for others' articles; provided general technical consulting on overall direction and content of journals.

Managed all aspects of technical support: development, network administration, and end-user.

• Established philosophies, architecture, policies, and procedures for department.
• Developed general staff and new-hire training procedures.
• Built developer support team from three to five engineers, and network administration and end-user support team from zero to five engineers.

Provided technical assistance to district and regional SEs in critical sales situations.

Managed projects, negotiated contracts, managed local and remote staff (training, performance, salary review).

Education

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, Massachusetts)

• Bachelor of Science and Master of Science, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; thesis: "A Manager for Named, Permanent Objects."
• Bachelor of Science in Management Science.