Some Projects: William P. “Bill” Waters

Here are some examples of projects I have worked on over the years.

• Callaway Golf
  • www.CallawayGolf.com
• Dannon
  • www.Dannon.com
• Edge Shave Gel (Energizer Personal Care)
  • www.EdgeShave.com: Launched March 2011. Complete overhaul of the CPG site. 
  • Winner of 2010 W3 Gold Award for Website Design and Visual Appeal
  • Development of an Edge branded Facebook Application featuring a MMA-style interactive fighting game
• S.Pellegrino (Nestle Waters North America)
  • Sparkling Conversations  Facebook app for S. Pellegrino Sparkling Natural Mineral Water
• Unilever Multi-brands
  • Redesign of global brand site: www.MakingLifeBetter.com – October 2012
• Purina
  • www.PureLove4Pets.com
  • www.activelife4activedogs.com
• Lufthansa Airlines
  • www.Lufthansa-Moments.com (site now retired) for a Lufthansa sweepstakes in 2008
    • Winner of 2008 IAC (Internet Advertising Competition) award winner for Best Airline Online Campaign and Website Experience

  Credit Card Conversion
  In 2004, the U.S. credit card division of The Royal Bank of Scotland Group (RBS NB) asked me to examine its credit card partner and affinity programs and come up with a plan on how to handle them going forward.  This series of credit card portfolios were inherited from the bank that had recently sold its entire credit card portfolio to RBS.

  First, I had the finance group perform some analysis to determine whether the various programs were even profitable.  From this analysis, it was determined that only a handful were profitable enough keep in their present program.  Of the rest, it was decided that RBS would benefit most by rebranding them to an existing, established RBS credit card, thus reducing much of the special handling costs of managing such a number of different programs.

  Secondly, I reviewed the individual contracts that were in place with each partner/affinity and obtained approval from the RBS Legal team that certain programs could be shut down and converted to an RBS program.  I developed a project plan and a cross-functional team was established to coordinate the conversion process, as cardholder notification, shutdown process timing and rebranding to new cards required a lot of effort due to the number of different programs involved. In addition, rewards points (for those programs that had them) had to be tracked and accounted for in order to orderly shut down some programs within the contract parameters.

  Because of contract obligations and goodwill it took nearly 18 months to fully convert all of the various program cards to new RBS-branded cards.  In the end, RBS was saving over $18,000 per month in just administrative expenses over what was being spent before we began this project.

  Cross-platform Automation
  In the mid-1990’s, as stock market transaction levels began to increase significantly, the rate of acceleration became greater than Nasdaq’s ability to keep pace by adding the required hardware platforms in a timely and efficient manner.  Although the primary transaction system had its own recovery mechanism that instantly re-initialized the application, the overall system configuration had become so complex, with interdependencies among various hardware platforms, that recovery from any system failure began to take longer and longer.

  Basically, computers are fast and their recovery period is pretty quick. The slowest component of the recovery process is the human element, where a computer operator must respond to system prompts in order to restart the proper process at the proper time.  We found that this was causing the elapsed recovery time to approach 8 minutes.  Considering the number and complexity of interconnected mainframes that were in play, this does not sound like a very long time, but in the stock market every second is costing someone millions of dollars.  My team and I were charged with reducing the recovery time.

  After much analysis we centered on a little known application that resided on one of the Unisys mainframe platforms, called AMS or the Autoaction Message System.  With this application, we were able to write recovery scripts that would, in the event of a system failure, control the recovery process across the 4 primary hardware platforms in an automated fashion by “reading” various console messages and starting the appropriate process without having to rely on a human console operator to read-interpret-act correctly.  Once perfected, our recovery process time shrunk from nearly 8 minutes to just 54 seconds.

  System Migration
  In 1996, Nasdaq began construction on a new $56 million data center, which was to be built within 13 months.  I was named the project manager for the system migration plan from the “old” data center into the new facility.  This involved existing hardware migration, installation of new hardware, upgrading of the network infrastructure and eventual application migration, testing and implementation into production.

  I developed a multi-track project plan in the hopes of reducing any potential bottlenecks that could have arisen in such a complex migration. In 1997, construction was complete and the new hardware was installed and tested in the new data center. At night and on weekends, we tested every component of the complex.  This took several months, as we absolutely had to ensure a seamless migration because we were working with live stock market applications and could not afford even the smallest interruption.  Although this was a long and strenuous migration, in the end we accomplished the task and never had one second of downtime on any stock market platform.