Marko Pyhäjärvi

Marko Pyhäjärvi

Project Manager at Vaisala Oyj

Finland

Current
Past

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Education
  • Helsingin yliopisto
  • Metropolia Ammattikorkeakoulu
  • Helsingin Ammattikorkeakoulu Stadia
Recommended
Marko has 8 recommendations 8 people have recommended Marko
Connections
88 connections
Industry
Information Technology and Services
Websites

Marko Pyhäjärvi’s Summary

Personal Profile / Personal Attributes

• A "field marshal" with natural urge to lead and give structure and direction
• Self-directed, focused and strongly goal-oriented team coach
• Highly extroverted and enthusiastic promoter, speaker and marketer
• Visionary with ability to see and visualize the "big picture" and possible pitfalls
• Intuitive improviser who finds a way to reach the goal
• Positive, open-minded, social and optimistic

Experience / Specialities

• Highly educated and internationally experienced project leader
• Strong background in leading international and complex IT and software projects
• Strong experience in restructuring troubled projects and bringing them back to control
• Experienced in multicultural problem/conflict solving and negotiations
• Experienced in process development and leading change
• Good at team building with ability to inspire and motivate people to go the extra mile
• Focused on communication, adaptive planning and continuous re-prioritizing

Marko Pyhäjärvi’s Specialties:

Project management, team leading, software development and testing, agile methods, architecture development, business process development, subcontractor management and contract negotiations, Internet marketing, search engine optimization.

Marko Pyhäjärvi’s Experience

  • Project Manager

    Vaisala Oyj

    (Public Company; VAIAS; Electrical/Electronic Manufacturing industry)

    October 2009 — Present (3 months)

    My present endeavor is to bring back control to a troubled project that I took over few months ago. My responsibility is to finalize the project by the end of this year in order to start production and sales activities of the road weather information system in the beginning of 2010. My challenge is to recognize all possible stakeholders, quickly analyze the present situation and gather all remaining requirements, solve conflicts and act as a diplomat, and finally negotiate the needed resources in order to get the work done. Also big part of the work is to effectively lead a team of six people working in Finland, UK and USA. Up-front planning is out of question, so I am using methods such as adaptive “on flight” planning, daily stand-up meetings with prioritizing, frequent communication, and “leading by walking”, which means daily face-to-face discussions instead of bouncing email messages back and forth.

  • Project Manager

    Vaisala Oyj

    (Public Company; VAIAS; Electrical/Electronic Manufacturing industry)

    January 2009 — October 2009 (10 months)

    Previously in Vaisala I lead a software development project which is part of a larger program delivering a next generation weather forecasting system to NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) of United States. I had a team of developers and testers distributed to Finland and Colorado, U.S., and our aim was to build a complex software subsystem providing crucial services to the whole system. In this project I applied a mixture of Scrum and Rational Unified Process (RUP) practices in my project leading style. The whole program was complex, troubled and turbulent, but we managed to deliver a pretty well functioning subsystem in time and in budget. Biggest challenges I and other project managers faced were the scope creep, changing roles and responsibilities in the program, lack of clearly defined process, and continuous conflicts and cultural challenges between Finns and Americans. It was a tough project, but a great learning experience.

  • Project Manager

    Vaisala Oyjj

    (Public Company; VAIAS; Electrical/Electronic Manufacturing industry)

    August 2008 — January 2009 (6 months)

    My second project in Vaisala a big time learning experience to me. I was given a goal to develop a multi-purpose software platform used in Vaisala’s software system development and delivery projects. I was very motivated and interested because I have a strong background in software development, and I knew exactly what we were doing. Anyhow, this project was a true failure. My team never released a piece of code. In my lessons learned session I figured that this project suffered from the lack of empowerment and mandate. We had great ideas and an inspired team, but when it was time to start development, we faced big barriers. There were two competing organizations having different solutions, but better contacts to decision makers. After months of fighting this project was killed. In this project I learned the importance of a project charter, diplomacy, continuous evangelizing of the upcoming change, and getting the support of key stakeholders and decision makers. Anyhow, I am happy that I got my change to fail and learn.

  • Project Manager

    Vaisala Oyj

    (Public Company; VAIAS; Electrical/Electronic Manufacturing industry)

    February 2007 — July 2008 (1 year 6 months)

    My first project in Vaisala was so called Tools and Methods Unification in which the primary goal was to unify all software development tools and methods across Vaisala offices in Finland, UK and USA. In this project my responsibility was to lead a team of experts defining the solution, and finally deliver an optimal solution of the need for tools and methods unification. I worked as a facilitator and team builder of a multi-cultural team finding various solutions to a number of problems. I focused on working as a negotiating diplomat because of expert disagreements, conflict solver, and promoter and marketer of the solutions. My biggest challenges were to get agreement among the team and to sell solutions to management. The project was successful and the solution was delivered to the next project implementing it.

  • Software Project Manager

    Metso Endress+Hauser Technology AG

    (Public Company; Machinery industry)

    October 2005 — January 2007 (1 year 4 months)

    I lead a software development project in Basel, Switzerland, with a team creating a new version of a software product to automation industry. My responsibilities in project management included obvious initiating, planning, execution and control, and closing phases, but my typical work month included mainly subcontractor management and contract negotiations, daily team leading, coordination and communicating with the stakeholders of mother companies, leadership of change control boards, reporting to company steering group, and controlling budget. I shared also some responsibilities with my operational manager, such as planning of yearly action plan and technology strategy, definition of project charters, and personal development discussions with team members. In this project I applied agile methods (Scrum + RUP) which resulted in about 50% decrease in project execution time.

  • Software Quality Assurance Leader

    Metso Endress+Hauser Technology AG

    (Public Company; Machinery industry)

    March 2005 — September 2005 (7 months)

    I was invited to join a multicultural team developing automation industry software in Basel, Switzerland. They had troubles with quality assurance, and my primary goal was to restructure the whole quality assurance process. My secondary goal was to get the unmotivated and conflicted team reunified and motivated, because there were strong barriers between developers and testers. In this position I analyzed the present situation and developed a new quality assurance process model based on industry best practices. I was responsible for leading the software quality assurance team with outsourced partners, and provide quality test activities to software development process. After the painful start we managed to reach a great co-operation and high inspiration between team members. As a result the project released a new version of the software with much higher quality.
    Additionally I provided my contribution to software process development by developing our test process, root cause analysis, software reviews and incident management (based on ITIL and RUP). Personally I believe my greatest achievement in this project was that we replaced the previous ad-hoc and undocumented “test process” with a repeatable, structured and documented test process with top notch tools.

  • Software Team Leader

    Ericsson

    (Public Company; ERIC; Telecommunications industry)

    August 2003 — March 2005 (1 year 8 months)

    I worked as a software designer and team leader in an organization developing a Media Gateway for UMTS network market. My main responsibility was to lead the team of seven software developers in order to reach the goals set by project managers. My role as a team leader consisted of organizing the work coming from project managers, motivating and inspiring team members, team development through face-to-face development discussions, software process development together with the team. As a designer, I also took part into design work, which was based on C/C++ programming and UML-modelling. In my master’s thesis I empirically studied how successful Ericsson's internal software process improvement project was compared to other process improvement projects of the industry. This position was my first touch to leadership, and it basically proved me that I was heading towards right direction.

  • System tester

    Ericsson

    (Public Company; ERIC; Telecommunications industry)

    January 2001 — August 2003 (2 years 8 months)

    I worked with operation and maintenance issues of GSM and UMTS network nodes (MSC, BSC, MGw). The work was mainly node and network level trouble shooting, and operation and maintenance work. The work included much onsite support and customer acceptance tests at customer sites around Europe. Additionally, about 40% of the working time I did database designing and management, tool designing and programming. The technologies, languages and products I used included for example Sybase, MS SQL Server and MySQL database products, Java servlets, JSP and PHP.

Marko Pyhäjärvi’s Education

  • Helsingin yliopisto

    MSc , Software engineering , 2003 — 2009

    Primary subject software engineering, secondary subjects mathematics, telecommunication and leadership

  • Metropolia Ammattikorkeakoulu

    BSc , Telecommunication and computer networks , 2000 — 2002

    Bachelor's degree in the field of telecommunication and computer networks.

  • Helsingin Ammattikorkeakoulu Stadia

    Erikoissairaanhoitaja , Sisätaudit ja kirurgia , 1995 — 1998

    Bachelor's degree in nursing.

Additional Information

Marko Pyhäjärvi’s Websites:

Marko Pyhäjärvi’s Interests:

Professional: Business Development and Leadership, Project Management, Agile Methods, Networking, Entrepreneurship Leisure: Alpine and Cross Country Skiing, Mountain Biking, Running, Music, Astronomy, My Wife & Kids

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