Professional Overview
Career History
A comprehensive overview of my professional journey, detailing the roles and responsibilities across various organizations.
MBA and CAPM©-qualified project manager, recently Executive Director within the Product and Solutions Business Operations department in Circana1, with experience of supervising and/or implementing 50+ projects from 2015 to date. Top internal customer satisfaction in converting business requirements to actionable plans, in mapping and improving the value chain of products and processes, in communicating clearly and concisely, and in responding to changes with significant corrective measures. Eight years of experience in operations management, responsible for production and quality control of tier-one clients’ deliverables. Reliable collaborator with a sharp focus on knowledge management, efficiency, and waste control in a global matrix corporate structure.
Circana | Executive Director - Project Manager, Product Business Operations (World)
Nürnberg, Germany | -
Achievements
- Led, managed and implemented innovation and change initiatives.
- Drove success for the organization through continuos improvement in operational excellence and efficiencies. Part of "Force multiplier" and change agent team, increasing effectiveness of the groups with which we worked.
- Led and managed a multi-year project to consolidate deliverable definition, data collection and production process of a global strategic product (~1 million USD direct annual revenue and contributing to quality assurance of another ~5 million USD of other products), previously home-grown differently in seven different countries' offices.
- Supported transition to narrative status update to top management and adding-value discussion-only meetings, replacing PowerPoint-based communications and round-of-the-table updates.
- Created and presented a best-practices guide on inclusive language, as part of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion corporate team.
Role and responsibilities
- … as a Project Manager
- Develop and manage plans to implement change initiatives demanded by the marketplace and designed by the Product Development team.
- Create, lead, manage and motivate the team responsible and consulted for project execution, moderating technical conversations and resolving conflicts.
- Resolve temporary perceived extraordinary crisis.
- Migrated processes and documentation from a project environment to a production environment.
- Build project charters following specifications and business requirements.
- Plan and control costs.
- Collect and dispatch requests.
- Learn and transfer technical skills and processes.
- Review the business case and compliance of the business requirements and the technical scope.
- Analyse stakeholders estimating what’s at stake or to be gained by every interested party.
- Review lesson learned from past initiatives and apply to current ones.
- Read how the other works, how much workload can absorb, and at which cost for the other initiatives they are working on.
- … as a Program Manager
- Create, maintain, and review the strategy to accomplish the team’s mission, and the company's larger goals, by reviewing, allocating, scheduling, measuring, and challenging the requested pipeline of project.
- Ensure the projects being worked on by the team deliver measurable value and comply with corporate strategy.
- Ensure communication of the value invested and generated, in a relevant and interesting format and content: communicate the growth, the innovation, and the value added by each project.
- focus on outcomes and value (purpose, rationale, benefits, impact, strategy) in addition to inputs and outputs (planning, estimations, costs, time, scope, risks).
- Review compliance to objectives (is it in line with personal/corporate objectives? is the effort reasonable, considering the outcome?) in addition to compliance to rules (is it aligned with company policies? did we fill the right form? chain of command/decisions?)
- Match needs and opportunities with strengths and competencies in addition to matching requests with resources.
- … as a Operations Implementation Manager
- Coordinate new data sources onboarding, ensuring data quality, completeness, and stability.
- Manage change in existing processes and products.
- Runs data investigation, incident tracking and implement corrective actions.
- Support developments.
- Monitoring system to analyze performance.
- Push and encourage process improvements, acceleration, optimization and simplification.
- Convert project work into production business-as-usual.
Circana | Executive Director – Program Manager, Project Management and Implementation (World)
Nürnberg, Germany | -
Achievements
- Led a fast structural improvement in quality and value generated to a product in response to a competitor developing a carbon copy of it by winning away existing business partners: idea to MVP launch ~3 months, and another ~3 months for a second phase with more that double data granularity provided to clients.
- Introduced the "project journal" recording daily activities, and the "project blog" weekly summary of key progress indicators, past achievements, and action items list customized for the recipient.
Responsibilities
- Created, maintained, and constantly reviewed the strategy to accomplish the Project Management Office team’s mission, and company larger goals, by reviewing, allocating, scheduling, measuring, and challenging, the European pipeline of projects.
- Ensured the projects being worked on deliver measurable value and comply with corporate strategy
- Communicated value invested and generated in a relevant and interesting format and content
- Led, managed and implemented innovation or special projects such as new ideas.
- Work with Product on evaluating projects that can lead to new business opportunity considering client's peculiarity and to implement the fastest and the most secured new services.
- Ensure that the initiatives being pursued in the Europe region are aligned with the corporate goals and directions, and stay on track during the project life cycle. Support and coordination for my project managers colleagues to constantly question and monitor the value invested and generated in initiatives, and review the alignment to what is considered important and contribute to the strategy definition by top management.
- Developed PowerApp dashboard to communicate innovative and change projects to senior management.
Circana | Director – Project Manager and Implementation (World)
Nürnberg, Germany | -
- Led and managed 20+ (4 of highest importance) and implemented 30+ (2 of highest importance, notably the launch of Beauty retail tracking service in Germany) projects across the operations organization within Europe. Proficient in waterfall, Agile and blended project management methods.
- One of the abovementioned projects resulted in the larger and longest 7-digits contract with a global sport industry leader in company history. The team responded to a time-sensitive industry need and developed a solution to move from monthly data to weekly data points, adapting all production and quality assurance processes.
- Assisted Product team in building business requirements based on market needs. Developed operative plans. Managed risks and inevitable changes.
- Developed a proof-of-concept for a "Roadmap Governance" initiative, a Microsoft SharePoint/Office365/PowerBI/PowerApp Projects Roadmap management suite with dashboards, milestone tracking, project life cycle monitoring, automated processes’, and workflows’ notifications, to survey 100+ projects from idea to launch for the European Business Services 60+ people team.
- Engaged, led, and monitored resources in teams composed of 50+ workers; ensure relevant communications and teamwork; train, or ensure training for, fellow team members on internal processes, policies, and software.
- Update management regularly; engage sponsor and stakeholders for conflict resolution.
Circana | Manager – Projects Implementation (Europe)
Nürnberg, Germany | -
Achievements
- Developed a Python package to score and run a suite of data quality and compliance checks on new sources of data: data ingestion and processing of large volumes of data (~150 periods of historical data, 10+ MB and ~20-50k lines per period); adjust for industry-related expected market seasonality; processing and calculation of data-specific KPIs such as number of unclassified records, outlier periods, similarity with existing sources; publish results in HTML and plot using bokeh and matplotlib packages.
Responsibilities
- Executed 7 corporate projects within Europe to construct new products or enhance existing ones.
- Developed new products for consumer purchase behavior surveying using corporate platform and calibration with point-of-sale databases, attuning all dedicated Operations teams as a single point of contact within extended project teams.
- Supervised projects impacting a global heterogeneous database, applying radical structural changes while keeping continuity of day-to-day data entry/maintenance operations.
- Prepared tailored deliverables, working files, dashboards, and communications to stakeholders, to facilitate focusing on task to excel at, without getting stuck in procedural details.
- Employed proper analysis tool (software, process, algorithm) to extract information and insights from different types of datasets, from raw data input to final end-user data produced.
- Ensured max transparency on the outcomes of the initiatives, being them either short-term financially tangible or more strategically important, to highlight the dotted line between each the team members and the company success.
Circana | Dictionary Manager and Senior Data Analyst (Europe)
Nürnberg, Germany | -
- Coordinated global commercial and support teams to solve conflicts and accomplish corporate projects.
- Enhanced quality and efficiency for Quality Control tasks by building a monitoring system to analyze editing performances on day-to-day activities and projects to plan costs and help Toys Directors allocate resources without jeopardizing ongoing productions.
- Facilitated corporate projects implementation assisting Operations Director.
Circana | Operations Manager (Italy, Spain, Germany)
Milan, Italy | -
- Planned and organised daily activities and medium-term projects working closely with Development & New Initiatives, Product and Practice teams.
- Tracked and optimised processes and results: continually met corporate objective of 96% On-Time & Correct deliverables.
- Improved operational systems to gain efficiencies by creating new tools and automation designed for reducing impact of ongoing weekly and monthly repetitive activities.
- Monitors data collection and troubleshoot missing reception and data quality incidents.
Circana | Senior Data Analyst (Italy)
Milan, Italy | -
- Tracked weekly data reception and improved quality control. Produced reporting and directed delivery to final clients.
- Served commercial teams for business related tasks, and Operations Director on corporate projects.
- Migrated all local production processes to the new Global Operations center in Ireland through training, documenting and coaching the local team.
Donatiello s.r.l. | Production Non-supervisory Worker → Shift Supervisor → General Foreman
Somma Lombardo, Italy | -
- Acted as primary foreman responsible for production, machine programming, storing, maintenance, processes and quality control on entire production cycles of 20+ automated and semi-automated thermosetting, bulk molding compound and thermoplastic molding machines, matching daily orders with production capacity and storage (2005 – 2008).
- Led molding plant shifts of 8 workers for plastic molding, core making, and casting machine programmer, setter, operator, and QC, balancing demands with resources available (2003 – 2004).
- Operated semi-automated molding plant machines, performed finishing and quality control (1999 – 2002).
Notable Contributions
Highlighting key projects and initiatives that extended beyond my primary duties, creating lasting impact.
Projects portfolio monitoring
I created different dashboards to monitor KPIs of a portfolio of ~20 projects, tracking:
- estimated duration (from 3 to 18 months projects' lifecycles);
- workload for resources by department (~6 project managers, ~60 total people involved);
- dependencies across projects.
This was a decisive driver for demonstrating that estimations done in the past years on project effort were lower than actuals, and led to hiring two more resources in our team, resulting in higher effectiveness in the years to come.
Dashboards used a self-developed system of data pull from SalesForce (projects list and estimated return of investment), data pull from SharePoint (weekly timesheet of actual effort by project), metrics publish in Excel and status update publish in PowerApp.
Data Quality monitoring
I designed a Python package to run a suite of data quality and compliance checks and scoring processes to support change initiatives to include new sources of data. Its capabilities included:
- data ingestion and processing of large volumes of data: ~150 periods of historical data, 10+ MB and ~20-50k lines per period;
- adjust for industry-related expected market seasonality
- processing and calculation of data-specific KPIs such as number of unclassified records, outlier periods, similarity with existing sources;
- publish results in HTML and plot using bokeh and matplotlib packages
I used this tool for most of the following similar projects, until my role changed.
Services up/down due to COVID lockdowns
As results of lockdowns in several regions where my company track point-of-sales data, we needed to communicate promptly which services our company was going to guarantee, and which needed to be paused, over hundreds of live "frequencies" of data accesses. I developed a dashboard that collected information of services running and paused from several internal sources of data, and created simple templates and macros to hand-over to non-skilled operators to run themselves.
More than the relatively simple process to collect and process the information, the challenge was to develop a process that can be run by a person correctly without any assistance:
- the person did not have any instrument to troubleshoot the tool in case of malfunction; they could have rebuilt the result by a manual data mining, however with significant effort and high chance of errors;
- the person was in a timezone that gave us only two hours of overlapping working hours: any problem during non-overlapping working hours would have waited the next day for my assistance;
- the person was an executive vice president, and was asked these updates by the top management of the company: these updates were communicated to our main clients and had consequences on lasting strategic relationships and long-term contracts;
- the person needed the tool the day before the request;
The process was developed in a few days and handed over to the colleague. They ran it for the incoming few weeks until there was the need, and was positively received by them.
Roadmap management demo
I developed a Microsoft SharePoint/Office365/PowerBI/PowerApp Projects Roadmap management suite with dashboards, milestone tracking, project life cycle monitoring, automated processes’, and workflows’ notifications, to survey 100+ projects from idea to launch for the European Business Services 60+ people team. The idea was freezed as global corporate management choose to rely on an external roadmap management provider.
Issue Resolution Tracking demo
I developed a proof-of-concept workflow based on SharePoint, Forms and Workflow to report, track and communicate process issue on published data. The idea was freezed as management partnered with an external provider of business process management system.
Consumer open-ends cleaner
In the early days before language models and machine learning I built a tool on Microsoft Excel 2003 and VBA2 to automate cleaning of survey open-end3 responses. Condensing the algorithm, it detected keywords in the text, and matched versus a key/value table for cases when human judgement would have been overkilling. It managed different languages, character sets, currencies, and typos. Since in those days this activity was done by the account managers (colleagues that were responsible to interface with clients not only about our data but also about the commercial relations between our company and them) this tool solved two main problems: an operational efficiency problem (limit expensive human activity versus cheaper machine activity, maintaining comparable level of quality of the output) and a deontology problem (maintain a barrier between data creation and data analysis/consumption/commerce). Due to its simplicity to configure and run even by non-Excel proficient operators, this tool was estimated to save two days of manual work every month for each of the five countries in scope.
PowerPoint auto-building
I developed a Powerpoint 2003 / VBA2 tool to automatically create a set of ~10 slides from chart templates, data extracted from the company proprietary software, and client- and brand-specific logo/palette. Used for three top-tier clients for a monthly deliverable that required a shipping-only presentation (no on-site commentary), it did not require custom notes and text. This yielded dual benefits: it was estimated to save one day of manual work every month, and increased client satisfaction for the same day anticipated delivery.
Footnotes:
Circana is a global market research company that provides insights and information on consumer trends and market dynamics. They specialize in tracking and analyzing consumer purchasing behavior across various industries, including retail, technology, entertainment, and more. Circana collects data from multiple sources, such as point-of-sale systems, consumer surveys, and online panels, to offer comprehensive market intelligence and advisory services to their clients. It is the result of the merger, in August 2022, between Information Resources, Inc. (“IRI”, founded in 1979, 2019 worldwide revenue: $1,325 million, U.S. employees: 3,639. Source: https://www.ama.org/marketing-news/2020-top-50/) and The NPD Group (“NPD”, founded in 1966, 2019 worldwide revenue: $444 million, U.S. employees: 1,185. Source: https://www.ama.org/marketing-news/2020-top-50/), resulting in a candidate for the next Fortune 1000 list.
Visual Basic for Applications is a scripting language, that is used in the Microsoft Office tool suite. Its syntax is based on Visual Basic. (source: wikipedia:Visual Basic for Applications)
Open-ended questions are questions that cannot be answered with ‘yes’ or ‘no’, but require the respondent to elaborate on their points. As example, when asked for the location of the store where the purchase happen, and the store was not on the provided list for reasons such as missing entry in the stores database, or new opening of such store.
