André Sanz

Project Management Principal

A highly experienced Information Technology Leader with a proven track record of success in managing critical IT operations, business-focused projects & customer relationships. Critical thinker, leader and communicator who can inspire changes in people and drive changes in process & technology to achieve great results.

A proven track record of delivering in areas including: Client Technology, Technology Training, Vulnerability Management, Service Management, Service Delivery, Program Management & Project Delivery.

For more information, grab a copy of my resume, reach out to me via my contact form, LinkedIn or jump directly to these sections: Experiences, Employment, Skills, Volunteering & Education.

Experiences

“Follow the Sun” Service Desk: Conceptualized & designed the program, presented to senior leadership including our corporate CIO & regional CIO’s, then led a team of 12 project managers in the United States, Europe and Australia. Implemented a global Service Desk organization across three continents for Altria Global Services, including people, processes & a new Service Management tool – saving over $400k/y in overtime salaries, while improving customer service scores and team satisfaction.

Corporate Trainer: Created a training program for Microsoft Office, implemented across GE Capital, that trained local trainers in our major locations. This provided local expertise & experience that provide support long after the training session were over. This included project management, training material development and ensuring continuous customer satisfaction through the use of surveys and “office hours” feedback sessions, a new concept at the time.

Service Management Consolidation: Consolidated disparate Service Management disciplines distributed across the Wells Fargo Wholesale Technology business for into a single team. This provided better team performance & retention, cost-savings, and as true partners to the development organization, improved software deployment timings and reduced negative impacts to the production environments.

Skills

Communicator The ability to communicate at all levels of the organization. Whether it’s technical details, leadership trends, service management or application development, conducting meaningful conversations is critical skill.

Process Focused Being process focus in an operational organization is critical to an organizations success. Knowing what your organization does and how it does it, provides the knowledge needed to pivot in today’s ever-changing environment.

Project Management Thinking like a Project Manager, I’m able to drive my team’s to successfully complete discrete work packages. This helps to complete simple improvements to provided services – the ability to pivot.

Manager of People People are obviously your most important asset; Managing teams dynamics, ensuring job satisfaction, all while keeping an eye on succession planning are key components of an engaged, productive & successful team.

Employment

[2023 – Present] Evernorth Health Services, Project Management Principal Evernorth Technology point of contact for Cigna Information Protection (CIP), Global Infrastructure & Operations (GI&O) and Audit to ensure identification, reporting, tracking & remediation of outstanding vulnerabilities,findings/issues & technology debt.

[2017 – 2023] Wells Fargo Bank, Senior Technology Manager, Platform Management & Resilience: Led the Service Management & Control team supporting the Commercial & Investment Banking lines of business. Specific functions include Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management, Release Management and Vulnerability Management.

The team provides first line response to our business via an Emergency Vulnerability Management Team, that can mobilize to respond to and manage critical and zero-day vulnerabilities that must be remediated within 72 hours of identification. since its formation, this team managed approximately 17 emergency events per year, with zero failures.

[2015 – 2017] General Electric (GE) Capital, Operations Leader: Lead a technical operations team of 24 people focusing on stable 24/7/365 operations of GE Capital’s Open Systems Wintel/Unix technologies and underpinning services. Manage vendor support teams and maintain oversight of associated staff.

Responsible for operations, performance monitoring and other duties required to run and maintain a multi-client, multi-system hardware and software environment.

  • Reduced Priority 1 (P1) incidents by 8% in the first 6 months through the implementation of highly-coordinated morning application stability checkouts.
  • Improved IT team’s business knowledge & understanding of application criticality by fostering open communication with the business and coordinating and managing the use of business-to-IT “Lunch & Learn” sessions.
  • Directed, managed, planed and administered the operational & administrative activities of the Open Systems support team, including incident resolution, problem management and the execution and completion of corrective actions.
  • Developed a Service Catalog and associated policies, processes & procedures to help define what the team did, how the team did it, and what our customers could expect.
  • Managed and coordinated business partners & vendors via direct prioritization of workload and oversight of operational support teams.
  • As a key IT stakeholder, I participated on multiple cross-functional project teams, including new application development, infrastructure security, integration of business-acquired applications, and global initiatives.
  • Drove the development of an operational dashboard designed so that members of both the leadership teams & the Operations Teams understood the state of the business from an IT readiness perspective.

[2013 – 2015] General Electric (GE) Capital, Service Delivery Manager: Responsible for ensuring applications for the GE Capital Bank & the Customer Growth Initiatives (CGI) teams run at top performance levels (meeting SLA’s), and incident restoration occurs quickly to allow development teams focus on growing the business. Extensive experience in managing both customer applications and customer expectations.

Accountable for the performance, monitoring, governance and communications across all areas including service management, incident and change management & continual service improvement.

  • Partnered with application teams to take over operational responsibilities, reducing our application teams outage participation by over 45%.
  • Managed both on-shore and off-shore resources, ensuring 24/7 operational coverage.
  • Responsible for managing the transition of application to the Service Delivery organization. This included developing a ‘short’ process, allowing applications to be integrated into the team day’s earlier than via the normal process.
  • Led all Priority 1 (P1) outage calls, driving teams across various businesses within GE to restore services as quickly as possible.
  • Owned the relationship between the GE Capital IT organization and the business application teams, ensuring business initiatives were understood and planned for from an infrastructure and support resource perspective.

[2004 – 2007] Altria Corporate Services, Senior Program Manager: As the global provider of WAN and Internet access solutions, the Global Networks group provided key services to the Altria family of companies, including Philip Morris USA, Kraft Foods NA & the Altria Group.

As the Program Manager for the Global Services Team, I was tasked with ensuring on-time delivery of projects through the guidance and control of scope, plans, staff and management.

This included the implementation of a global connection data center in New York City as a tool to maintain fundamental financial communications (i.e. General ledger) through a divestiture period.

[2000 – 2004] Philip Morris International, Senior Solutions Architect: Responsible for developing IT solutions to business requirements defined by stakeholders.

  • Global Help Desk organization support applications spanning multiple operating companies and geographies. Responsible for project management, technical coordination, customer communication & compliance and process engineering.
  • A Shared Services Data Center: This included analysis, approvals, build-outs, system, data, and application migration & operations processes. Delivered the solution 2 months early with better than expected SLA’s from the vendor for less cost.
  • A Service Management Tool Solution: Implemented ITIL-based solution across 3 data centers. Re engineered 7 processes, implemented a standard tool set (HP OpenView Service Desk), and created a ‘Follow the Sun’ Help Desk. Compliance to SLA’s increased over 30%, and outage minutes decreased over 50% in the first year.

[1996 – 2000] Philip Morris International, Manager, Client Technology: Led the effort to focus on using client technology as a tool to propel the business and not just support it.

Creating the Workstation Integration and Support Lab allowed better focus on customer technology management and gave the business teams a place to experiment and learn. 

Volunteering

  • Week of Caring, Coordinator – Worked as a team coordinator for the GE (now Wells Fargo) Week of Caring, supporting the Family & Children’s Aid in Danbury, CT. This included coordinating jobs and assignments for teams throughout the week, including painting, landscaping and cleanup projects.
  • Somers Science Research Foundation, Secretary: Responsible for managing a program budget & parent/student/teacher communications. Additional responsibilities include arbitration, by-law’s development & maintenance, insurance planning and maintaining relationships with other town and state boards and officials
  • Somers Youth Sports Organization, Head Coach: Worked as a head Lacrosse, Soccer & Baseball coach for over 10 years, Managing teams such as our youth Lacrosse clinic, with over 80 kindergarten boys registered, all the way up to pre-varsity club teams in Lacrosse & Soccer
  • Somers Boy Scout Troop 376, Board Member: Board member for the past 8 years, supporting & helping to build the troop’s growth to one of the strongest boy-led troops in Westchester County.

Education

  • Masters of Business Administration, Information Decision Technology Management, Iona College, New Rochelle, New York
  • Masters of Science, Public Administration, Long Island University, Dobbs Ferry, New York
  • Bachelors of Science, Criminology, C.W. Post College, Greenvale, New York
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