Jason Truman

Professional Agency Focused Experience

My entire career experience has been focused working for a couple different agencies as a full time permeant position.  Working for agencies for the past 25 years has allowed me to work with thousands of distinct different companies on their projects needs covering a vast array of verticals and sectors.

Smart Solutions ~3 Years (2021->2024)

https://www.smartsolutions.dev/
Tenure:  approx. 3 years (2021 -> 2024)
Type: Full-time, permanent, remote

About Smart Solutions:
Smart Solutions is an eCommerce development-focused agency with special focus on the SMB market for both B2B and B2C environments. Target clients most commonly are in the 5M-100M business size range.  Most clients are focused business within USA and Canada.  Key services include end-to-end site development, back office integrations, eCommerce Strategy and Consulting, and other related services with an especial strong focus on ecommerce related topics.  Smart Solutions is an agency with numerous clients, providing both large-scale builds as well as monthly maintenance and support plans. Please see their website for more information on who they are.

General Duties & Role: 
Smart Solutions chose to hire me due to my extensive prior experience as a Business Analyst & Solution Architect who also had significant Project Management skills.  I was hired primarily as a senior Business Analyst as well as secondarily as a project manager.  During my tenure, I helped both Smart Solutions internally as well as their clients.

For Smart Solutions directly I helped to improve their business process workflows, and significantly improve requirements gathering and related BA processes within the organization.  Additionally, I helped improve processes related to test planning and execution internally.  This included helping improve standard operating procedures, templates, guidelines, business and process flows in all related areas as well as internal education and supportive growth. Finally, I also helped to identify technical and developer skill gaps and provide guidance and growth to fill these gaps.

BA/SA Related:  For Smart Solutions clients, during my tenure, I was responsible for BA & SA focused work across all clients clients.  Tasks performed from the BA&SA roles covered all common analyst tasks listed higher up on this page.  Including but not limited to Requirements gathering, process analysis, technical analysis, wireframing, prototyping, documentation, and much more.

PM Support:  For any project involving technical needs, I was involved with supporting the other PM’s in the team, helping them them support their client’s needs.  Examples include: supporting with ERP or business unit integrations, business process management, custom business management system designs, financial system support,  test planning and execution, documentation, supporting estimating work and more.

PM Direct:  Additionally, during my tenure, while I was the primary BA/SA for all projects, I was also responsible for several clients as their primary Project Manager.   Clients whom I was a primary PM were usually those clients with more technically complex solution needs during their initial development phases, often passing off the projects to a different PM upon completion.  I also took on PM responsibility for a few clients who reached out and followed me from my prior agency, after hearing I was leaving wishing to continue to work with me, due to my long relationship with them, or others for load balancing reasons.

Graphically Speaking Services Inc – ~21 Years (1999 ->2021)

https://www.graphicallyspeaking.ca/
Tenure:  over 21 years (1999 -> 2021)
Type: Full-time, permanent, primarily on-site in office, some remote

About Graphically Speaking:
Graphically Speaking is one of the largest and most well established web and ecommerce development and design agency in western Canada.  Their clients and projects cross nearly all industry verticals, platforms, technologies and project types. Graphically Speaking’s team of ecommerce, web and digital marketing specialists have a proven track record of providing comprehensive development services for over 3,000 ecommerce and website projects across more than 2,000 unique distinct companies, businesses and other organizations.

General Duties & Role:
Graphically Speaking entered the internet arena and all things related to it upon my joining the company in 1999.  Prior to that they were primarily an agency focused on design, branding, marketing, presentation/slide development and related.

I was initially hired as a junior technical director with slight prior experience, and a demonstrable capability to cover a large variety of roles.  This included Business Analyst, Technical Director and Project Management related topics.

During my entire tenure at Graphically Speaking I was the only Business Analyst (we tried hiring others but never had solid success).  As such I was involved in virtually all projects the company worked on, especially those with any level of technical complexities, integrations or BA/SA needs.  The exception being some of the smallest web projects which had no level of BA needs such as brochure style sites.   Due to this, during my over 21 year tenure I worked with at least 1500 different distinct organizations and entities on their projects, probably significantly more.

Even in 2024, which is 3 years after leaving Graphically Speaking, if you review projects within their portfolio, I was involved with the majority of the companies listed so can speak on involvement in a great number of them.  (https://www.graphicallyspeaking.ca/portfolio/ecommerce-website-design-development)

My primary time focus for most of my tenure was on those projects with a detailed focus on any highly technically elements requiring BA/SA work. This gave me the opportunity to gain a vast amount of experience touching nearly every type of organization or business.  SMB’s, Enterprises, B2B, B2C, public sector, private sector, health & medical, financial and everything between.  There are very few industries I have not had at least some level of direct experience in.

Project types included nearly every type of project that is web focused, and many others that are application or database focused.  Web applications, intranets, extranets, ecommerce, websites, system integrations with POS/ERP/WHM, full custom from the ground up ERP & Application developments, full custom company portals, and much more.

Graphically Speaking is mostly technology agnostic, choosing the best platform and techology needs for their client projects.  As such there is a broad spectrum of the most popular technologies, changing with the times over the decades.  This included: various ecommerce platforms such as Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, Adobe Commerce and others;  various CMS systems such as WordPress, Drupal, Sitefinity and others;  various intranet & extranet & data applications such as Sharepoint, MS Dynamics, MSSQL, MySQL, custom systems and others;  countless system integrations such as  various POS, ERP, WHM systems, Association Management Systems, warehouse management systems and more;  common technologies and programming languages were utilized such as php, .net, all web-technologies and much more.   As I was a senior part of Graphically Speaking and the only BA for 21 years I was involved with all these systems, technologies, integrations and processes.

As a secondary role outside of BA/SA processes, I also performed limited levels of PM-related work, primarily with the most technically advanced or complex clients whose needs or internal capabilities exceeded the ability of other PMs to directly handle and support.  Usually helping PM these more complex projects as a primary or secondary PM during their development and launch phases, and sometimes staying on longer for those clients who had long term highly technical responsibilities.  As an example, staying deeply involved as a secondary PM and BA/SA for clients who may have been highly technical themselves with their own BA and technical teams as primary contact points.

As an additional side role,  I was also highly involved in supporting sales teams on the more complex technical sales.  Especially in the focus areas of requirements gathering during sales processes, presentations and communication during sales phases and building stakeholder relationship trust and comfort, as well as supporting budget quoting.

Also, as I was with Graphically Speaking for over 21 years, I eventually became a primary company leader, and was involved in company growth and direction, planning and implementation.  My leadership focus naturally being especially targeted towards technical aspects.