Nikolai Avteniev

Prior to joining Real Time Risk Systems LLC in October 2004, Nikolai was a Technology Officer at JPMorgan Chase, having joined the bank in 2001 as a System Analyst. He was a member of the Online banking development team. His responsibilities included cooperating with Project Managers and business liaisons (known as Business Analysts at JPMorgan) for requirement mining, designing and implementing technology solutions, together with mentoring Junior Systems Analysts.

Nikolai worked on a number of projects driven by a management decision to try to improve JPMorgan Chase’s online customer satisfaction ratings compared to other online banking providers (Citibank being the leader in this field). To this end he worked on a number of projects including online statement, check and other data viewing, projects for the Personal Financial Services online portal (a service provided to higher net worth individuals) and went through a complete project lifecycle for re-engineering the online account opening functionality.

This latter project (the online account opening project) was selected by senior management at JPMorgan as the pilot project for testing eXtreme Programming techniques at JPMorgan globally, (the senior VP for Retail Banking IT signed off on the project). During the summer of 2002, a team of six developers (including Nikolai) and two business analysts under the oversight of one project manager were hand picked to begin development of the project using eXtreme programming techniques with the advice of pioneers in this area (including premiere figures in the field, Kent Beck and Martin Fowler of the company Thoughtworks). The project was pronounced a huge success by the business leaders. It produced deliverables significantly faster and of higher quality (i.e., fewer bugs) than all other similar size development projects. Its cost effectiveness was clearly many times better than previous IT development. The project was immediately expanded to add two more teams of similar size to work on different projects, to test the techniques further.

Nikolai graduated with an M.S. in Computer Science from New York University in 2004 after three nights a week course work over two years. This followed a B.Sc. in the same field from Brooklyn College in 2001.