Escape Announces New Chief Operating Officer

Dateline: Roseville - February 2008

In a blog post early in January, Bob Towery wrote about the large number of opportunities and challenges we have in 2008.

To meet many of those challenges, Escape Technology is announcing the appointment of Ramona Marshall as our new COO.  This is the first time we have made an executive level appointment in an operational role.  It’s an important decision, and we want to share this information with our customers.

As a refresher, Ramona came to us last year with a huge amount of experience in Project Management at a large software company.  She started in a consulting position, introducing us to Project Office.  We immediately saw the potential and made her an Escapee.  Ramona did a great job with the projects we threw at her, and merged well with the people here, in other words, she bought into our culture!

For most of this decade, customers (and prospects) wondered “is Escape ever going to come through with a new system?”  Now that we have, and it is such a winner, people are wondering if we can meet our commitments?
The answer is YES.  With Ramona overseeing all our implementations, and coordinating the efforts of most of the people in the company, we expect a large leap toward the goal of doing quality work with more great customers. 

With seven years of hard work and a very large monetary investment in the Escape Online system, we believe the best way to “honor” our dedication is to make Escape Online available to as many users as possible.  So this means implementations at current and new customers alike.  It means we need to find more people to do support and implementations.  We will have to stretch resources, to be sure.  That’s life!  But we won’t commit to more than we can do professionally.

With my work running the development project day to day completed, I now have the opportunity to focus on two important roles.  First is the keeper of “the big vision” for the Escape Online system.  We have split Research and Development into two departments now, and I have a role in the new Research department.  Here is our new org chart:

My other role is to work with current and prospective customers on a more frequent basis.  There are a lot of people that I would like to spend some more time with, show them what we have been up to, and work toward their users being able to take advantage of this incredible system we have built.

Our VP of Customer Care, Barry Collins, is also looking at some new opportunities, and he’ll share them below.  In signing off now, I want customers, prospects and friends to know that we are taking a big step forward in our ability to perform quality implementations of our systems, and have our executive staff focus on what we can do most for our customers.

And now, here’s Barry:

About a year ago we started to plan for rolling out Escape Online to our customers, and we had “Escape for a Day” sessions to gauge the interest.  At the time we really had no idea how quickly customers would want to convert, and how that would fit with known commitments and new sales.  The response from all quarters was overwhelming, and we quickly realized that the addition of resources and the enhancement of processes were crucial to meeting those commitments. 

We began with structured project management and a project office within the company.  The result has been fabulous!  We can now manage projects better than ever, can do more projects, and can build a timeline well into the future to help our customers plan for implementation.  Our development and support efforts have also seen dramatic improvement, and everything we do at Escape is more cohesive and efficient.

This has allowed me to focus on my favorite part of the business: YOU, the customer.  My new role at Escape is to become an advocate for our customers within the company, and ensure that customer needs are being met. 
Over the next several months I plan to visit customers who have yet to convert, to discuss conversion and potential timelines.  I will also visit with customers that are LIVE on Escape Online, to observe their operation with an eye toward improving the product and enhancing future conversions.  These visits will also allow me to personally thank our customers for their valued business, and to share our plans with them.

I believe these visits will help us further refine our processes at Escape, so we always provide our customers with the best products and services.  And I’ll continue to spend time “on site” to keep the exchange going.  I will journal these visits on my Escape blog as well.

With Ramona’s help, we have reorganized not just Escape Customer Care but our entire company.  We have also hired, and continue to recruit, additional skilled staff to work in a structured project management environment.

So, let’s hear from Ramona:

At this time last year I found myself at a personal and professional crossroad and I left corporate America with no job prospect, in hopes of finding ‘something different’.  I wanted a position that was more meaningful and satisfying, that allowed me to have an effect on the overall operations of a company.  Ultimately, I wanted more responsibility and accountability for the operations I managed.

‘Something different’ found me via a phone call from a friend named Carole, which ultimately turned into the opportunity of a life time.  Although Escape is a much smaller company than any of my previous employers, it contains all the same disciplines and facets of the software development lifecycle that I have spent the past 15 years managing , so I immediately felt at home and got busy organizing.

I am confident that as COO, I can provide an organized and efficient approach to managing all of the work that lies before us in upgrading our customers to Escape Online and ensuring it happens in a timely fashion.  However, in order to do so, we have made some organizational changes to align the majority of our resources towards this effort.  

I am thrilled to be an Escapee and look forward to introducing the new organization in more detailed blogs over the next week, including the new structure for support/testing and IT.