Irene Waitzman, President
Mary Schoonover, Senior Vice President
Mary has been with Political Connection for 14 years and has held the positions of Human Resource Manager, Quality Assurance Manager, Operations Manager and is currently Director of Operations. Mary joined Political Connection after working 10 years for the Fortune 500 company, Pella Corporation. While at Pella she held various Human Resource positions and Production Coordinator on the manufacturing floor. She has extensive experience in Lean Manufacturing and the Toyota Production System. Mary's philosophy for her Operations Team is , " We work in a process driven environment , working lean and smart. There is no room for waste. I believe my best resource is my team!"
Mary has a passion for traveling the world and the Iowa Hawkeyes! Go Hawks!
After graduation, she worked directly in a Software House that molded her as a programmer analyst where she worked mostly in big banks in the Philippines. She has more than 20 year experiences in system development cycle and well versed in using programming language such as Informix, PHP, HTML and shell script on a UNIX and Linux platform with Informix Database. She currently has a certification with Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA), and Network +. Abby is Political Connection’s Systems Engineer, designing software for the company and supervises a group of PHP coders. She analyzes current systems and redesigns or implements new systems to offer enhancements in the operations. She has been working with Political Connection LLC for more than 14 years.
She believes, “Life is like a development cycle where we get to write our own style in code, test and execute but regardless how much effort and time we put in, there is still a big chance that it will fail. We don’t stop there, we debug, modify, and start the cycle from the top to bottom until we get it right. The most important lesson is we don’t dare to give up but we keep trying.”
Chris Goodwin, Corporate Vice President
Abigail (Abby) DeGuzman, Project Manager and Data Team
Chris Goodwin began her career with Political Connection in February of 2001. She held positions as Operations Manager and Director of Operations in her early years with the company and then eight years as the HR/Financial Manager. As Corporate Vice President, Chris leads the HR, Finance and IT divisions of Political Connection. Her teams help drive organizational success through workforce strategies that acquire, develop, reward and retain the best talent and continuous development of innovative, robust, and secure technology solutions for clients.
Chris holds a Bachelor’s degree in Management with an emphasis in Human Resources and an Associate’s degree in Accounting. She came to Political Connection with 8 years of experience in call center management and training with a Fortune 1000 company.
Chris resides in Glidden, Iowa, where she is actively involved in her local volunteer ambulance service as a state-certified EMT and in her local Rotary International chapter. Chris and Jack enjoy traveling, camping, and kayaking in the great Iowa outdoors. They have 3 grown children and 3 young grandchildren.