Erica brought order to chaos. She could take high-level direction and execute in collaboration with the rest of the teams. In addition to handling the day-to-day tactical execution for Addepar’s marketing initiatives, Erica stepped up and took ownership of specific marketing programs and projects. Her leadership inspired confidence among team members, which, in turn, created more room for scale and leverage within the organization. Erica moved the ball forward and established a better foundation for whoever would take over the team in the future. Thanks to Erica’s strategic marketing and project management expertise, after a smooth transition between the consulting team and full-time staff, Addepar was equipped to hit the ground running with new and innovative marketing initiatives.
– Brian Shenson |Co-Founder at Springboard Advisory Group, Inc.
Erica brings order to chaos and simply gets things done. She takes high-level direction and does a great job of collaborating with all the teams that she needs to partner with to execute. She is able to think through and execute the right strategies and processes to ensure whatever initiative she’s working on is successful.
I witnessed this first hand, watching Erica take on the role of helping to expand a nascent marketing function at the company into a more mature marketing team. She is highly organized and detail-oriented; within weeks of my starting, I watched as Erica first took on the task of capturing all current and planned marketing activities into one central data store, then moved to establish a framework for ensuring new marketing requests could be captured and prioritized.
Erica took ownership of specific marketing programs and projects, inspiring confidence among team members, and creating more room for scale and leverage within the organization. Finally, Erica was simply a great person to work with. She is highly intelligent, personable, and quite funny. I was lucky enough to get to work with her for a short period of time and would certainly hire her as a marketing consultant on any project that required excellent judgment, little handholding, and quality delivery.
– Mike Golaszewski |FinTech/Financial Service Executive
As business demands evolve, I have instances where I need to expand my team’s bandwidth to provide macro program management for highly visible, cross-functional initiatives. I rely on Erica as a trusted advisor to supplement my team’s resources as needs arise.
I recently engaged Erica’s services to drive organizational readiness as we moved a solution from hypothesis to pre-release to production and launch. Prior to engaging Erica’s assistance for solution organizational readiness, I engaged her services to lead a large cross-functional team, including 3rd parties, to build the commercial infrastructure to support a new cloud solution offering. In every instance, Erica reliably uses her own complimentary style coupled with our best practices and tools to successfully lead initiatives through the charter of the Advent PMO. She naturally facilitates large and small groups, remote or in-person meetings while remaining focused on meeting successful and well-communicated outcomes.
Erica knows how and when to steer teams based on business needs or executive guidance. Inverse, she knows when and how to diplomatically communicate upward to create greater awareness. I recommend Erica to any company that wants more organizational wins from completed initiatives.”
– Emilie Oberhauser | Director, Project Managment Office
I’ve had the pleasure of working alongside Erica as she successfully leads strategic projects – time & time again. This year, I sought her out to lead one of our organization’s top initiatives to build a global services cross-training program. I also engaged her creative, innovative ideas for a marketing project to unify our client messaging & build services presence on our client-only website. In both instances, I immediately turned to Erica since she is extremely adept at grasping critical drivers, aligning goals & building a comprehensive approach to guide efforts from concept to launch.
By engaging Erica’s services, I was able to work as the key business sponsor on both programs while focusing on my day-to-day responsibilities. As a global organization, we value how Erica works remotely by utilizing web conferencing with attendees across the globe. She uses our time wisely & runs meetings at a respectful pace. Our new marketing tools equipped the sales team to better position services & handle objections. The cross-training program evolved to align with business changes thanks to Erica working closely with the team and executive sponsor. Without her, this program would’ve died on the vine.
One of the most intangible results we’ve experienced with Erica is her ability to recognize deep-rooted blockers & guide our team to identify breakthrough ideas. I tremendously appreciate Erica’s breadth of skills & will continue to seek her for thought partnership & program execution.”
-Heather Fralich | Director, Customer Support
I have had the honor of working with Erica as a business partner over the past 4 years where she was an internal project manager and services product marketing manager. Erica has demonstrated a proven ability to bring process to coordinate teams, communications and deliver results. Here are a few projects I have worked directly with Erica on: (1) Service Capability & Performance certification where she was critical in setting the objectives, milestones, timeline and running all key meetings to help the team on track to achieve our certification for the Professional Services Organization; (2) Running internal Project Management Office/PMO projects for Disaster Recovery and 3rd Party Integration/Alliances which involved cross-departmental subject matter experts to come together and document best practice recommendations; and (3) Services Product Marketing where she lead services pricing analysis, collateral development, sales training and hosted client panels to promote services capabilities. Erica has the creativity, drive, insight, autonomy and experiences to run and deliver successful projects.”
-Chad Williams | Vice President, Global Professional Services
Erica is an expert at getting the job done. She is incredibly organized, a strong collaborator and is disciplined in program and project management. She has a great skill at adapting to the job at hand…being flexible where necessary, and diligent in areas where structure is necessary. I have observed her achieve equal success with internal projects, ones with our customers, as well as with our valuable technology and service partners. She has a great ‘service orientation’ and very successfully leads cross functional teams across the goal line. She is someone you can count on and a pleasure to work with.”
-Anthony Sperling | Executive Vice President, Global Customer Experience
I had the opportunity to work with Erica as part of Advent Software’s effort to obtain certification under the Service Capability & Performance (SCP) Standards. Erica guided Advent’s Client Services organization through its first certification audit and consecutive certifications for several years thereafter. In addition, she was instrumental in guiding the company’s Professional Services organization though it’s first few years of certification under the SCP Standards. She did an excellent job leading these projects, which involve interfacing with many organizations throughout the company. We also had the pleasure of having Erica do a best practice presentation at one of our Service Industry Summit events and worked with her to create a customer success story highlighting Advent’s experience with the SCP Standards.
I have always found Erica to be highly professional, extremely knowledgeable and a pleasure to work with. She was always willing to give her time to share best practices with others in the services community and discuss the methods she used to achieve success with the SCP Standards program. I would highly recommend Erica to anyone who needs help managing complex projects, working on service process improvement or quality programs or developing marketing communications content.”
-Greg Coleman | Vice President, Strategic Programs
Working with Erica has been a very rewarding and productive experience. She was able to take on a large, year-long marketing project and provide immediate support and value. The scope of the project has continued to increase as our needs have changed and Erica has been incredibly flexible and accommodating. She keeps everyone on task and ensures that all of the activities we have in motion are moving forward and have clear next actions and deadlines. Erica’s combined knowledge of Advent’s products and her superior marketing skills have been invaluable to ensuring a successful outcome. It’s been a fantastic experience working with her and we couldn’t do it without her!”
-Margaret Farmakis | Director, Professional Services Operations
I worked with Erica and experienced firsthand her GSD (gets stuff done) skills. During a major initiative to transition our firm from on premise software delivery – Erica was my partner in coordinating the entirely hands-free subscription to entitlement services for our firm. The project touched every corporate system – from contractual through service and support. Erica guided a multi-disciplinary team with humor and a positive attitude at all turns. I highly recommend her for her analytical, program management, and GSD skills.”
-Thomas Zdon | VP, Global Solutions Management
Erica DELIVERS! I’ve worked with her for over 2 years. She is awesome at keeping groups on task for the overall vision/mission. Her approach was well appreciated as she partnered with everyone to drive results. Deliverable dates, project scoping, and setting expectations to senior management were second nature to her. I believe she is a highly valuable asset for Services teams who are looking to drive Innovation.”
-Larry Lord | Director, Professional Services
I have worked with Erica in several different capacities in 15+ years at Advent, including the fact that Erica was the first person in Client Support to train me as a new Consultant, but more recently had the pleasure of working with Erica as the Project Manager for a Disaster Recovery (DR) project, which was initiated at the executive level, leveraged Advent’s proven Project Management Methodology, and included frequent updates to a Steering Committee that was responsible for the overall direction of the project. A few of the key highlights from this particular project included:
- Effective cross functional collaboration with a team of technical Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) from Sales, Professional Services, Client Support, and Product Development.
- Lead efforts to design, build, and validate content for a DR Guide, which was meant to serve a dual-purpose and benefit clients externally, as well as, to continually evolve as a resource internally for all client-facing Advent resources.
- Consistently met all project deadlines and deliverables, especially considering that the scope of the project had changed.
- Willingness and ability to try different tactics to maneuver around schedule conflicts and competing priorities, considering several of the SMEs on the team were required to travel on a weekly basis, and to manage differences in opinion to ultimately move the project across the finish line.
In addition to the highlights, as the Project Manager, Erica had to leverage various tools to centrally store and manage the various inputs and outputs, to effectively communicate the tasks and milestones associated with the project, as well as, for general communication and updates to the Steering Committee and other stakeholders throughout the project, including but not limited to the Business Requirements and Status Update Documents in Microsoft Word, the Project Plan in Microsoft Project, several Presentations in Microsoft PowerPoint, Salesforce Chatter, Microsoft SharePoint, and the DR Guide, which was created as both an Internal and External KB on the Advent Connection (client-facing website).”
-Steve Veigel | Principal, Product Management
Erica worked for me in both the role of team manager and dedicated project manager and later as a colleague who helped found and run our PMO. Not only is Erica a skilled project manager, but she is also highly creative and great to have on any team. She is highly organized, thoughtful, productive, and fun! I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend her for any type of work.”
-Casey Keller | Vice President, Global Client Services
Erica is an invaluable leader of any team she is on, and is a real pleasure to work. Her broad skill set allows her to wear many hats at the same time, making her a great fit for any organization with a lot on their plate. She is particularly good at establishing successful partnerships – internally and with third parties. She was critical in establishing our business unit’s PMO (Project Management Office) and directly managed various strategic projects that had real business impact. She also has the unique ability to both see the bigger picture, and distill information ito sales and client-facing tools that particularly resonated with Sales, a key stakeholder for our group. I look forward to working with Erica again!”
-Liz White | Senior Manager, Services Marketing
Erica was integral (and a pleasure to work with!) in helping to develop and facilitate a valuable working relationship between Advent and our firm. By drawing upon her expertise and industry experience, Erica helped define and deliver a marketing strategy through sound market research, ongoing validation and a fully integrated promotions and oversight framework.”
-Tobin Cochran | Managing Member, GIPS Compliance Consulting
It was a great pleasure to work with Erica Smigielski. Her ability to manage a wide variety of simultaneous projects, and to bring those projects successfully to fruition, is impressive. Even when unexpected difficulties arise, Erica remains calm, confident, and focused. Erica has the ability to retain her vision of a project while at the same time encouraging input from colleagues, and she trusts her coworkers to do their jobs without interference. Erica is also consistently supportive of her colleagues. I highly recommend her as a project manager.”
-David Leon Christensen | Technical Writer
Erica was an extremely competent, thoughtful and resourceful manager. She managed what I believe was one of the most efficient and productive client services teams within Advent. She was a pleasure to work with and I would recommend her highly.”
-Michael Hochanadel | Senior Associate, Client Services