My PowerDesigner story

When Powersoft bought S-Designor in 1995, I was a PowerBuilder backline support engineer.  Support management sent out an e-mail asking for volunteers to learn this new product.  Naturally everyone kept their mouths shut.  

Anyway my supervisor came by one day and said, "You've designed databases before, right? You could probably support S-Designor easily."

I said, "Maybe but, I don't know anything about modeling them"

He replied, "Don't worry about it, Go to this class and see what you think"

I came back from that class pumped.  Here was a really cool product that would not only benefit someone designing a database, but also developers, testers, and anyone involved with the life cycle of a database.  That was the beginning of nine years supporting S-Designor which later became PowerDesigner.  First I interned with the old S-Designor support team for three months.  Then for the next six months I was the sole S-Designor support engineer.  I can't remember how many support cases I took, but the numbers were high.  I finally convinced management that I needed help and built the support team from one to about eight engineers.  

Four years later after a support reorganization that moved all the PowerDesigner engineers into the larger Sybase support group, I joined the Product Support Team.  Our mandate was to be the interface between Customer Support and Product Engineering.  I was responsible for all PowerDesigner escalations,EBF and major release processes, technical support publishing, assisting with course development, administering Beta programs and help with QA .  During this time we launched the PowerDesigner newsgroup to enable customers, engineering and support to help each other with PowerDesigner questions.  We launched CodeXchange as a platform to share PowerDesigner models, vbscripts and other customizations. This time also covered the total re-write of the PowerDesigner product in version 7.0.  

The new architecture which began in version 7 ushered in two major changes to the PowerDesigner environment.  First, Sybase started adding major functionality to the product in the form of Object Modeling, Business Process Modeling, XML modeling, and it has not stopped since.  This meant that with each new release there were major new technologies to learn such as; Java, Visual Basic, Process modeling, XML Schemas, dimensional data modeling and many new database servers. Secondly, version 7 brought to the forefront the ability to customize PowerDesigner behavior.  This ability has been enhanced with every subsequent release.

After nine years at Sybase and another major reorganization, the entire Product Support Team was laid off.  For the last five years, I have been an independent consultant. Half of my consulting jobs are directly related to PowerDesigner. Jobs have included standard or custom training, advice on PowerDesigner usage, data modeling and customization.  The other half is a mix of Web development, .NET development and general technical support for small IT shops.

I will only briefly mention the 15 years before that, which included Implementation Manager for a Cobol based distribution and accounting package, IT Manager for a mid sized manufacturing company, installation and customization of a restaurant inventory and costing system, implementation of manufacturing systems  and other miscellaneous consulting work.

For a more formal description see my resume.