Q: What is your background and how does it influence the work you do here?
A: I spent a lot of time in healthcare. I was actually a finance major, not an IT guy. I really enjoyed working with systems while I was working in finance and slowly transitioned to working in the IT field. I worked mostly around Detroit starting at Trinity Health—it was Mercy Health at the time—doing financial work, then transitioned to consulting work in Information Technology. I focused on project management in the mid-1990s and worked with a lot of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications—financial, human resources, and inventory systems. In addition to Mercy Health, I worked on applications at Henry Ford Health System, Mt. Clemens General Hospital, Johnson Controls, Foremost Insurance, and others. So my career transitioned from finance to decision support applications to project management.
I’ve been at the University of Michigan for 14 years. I started as a contractor. At the time, our web presence for the college was in Advancement (then called Development, Marketing and Communications). A friend of mine led that department, Peggy Burns. She was trying to consolidate the LSA websites under one department and hired me to jump start that process and build enough credibility with the college to mandate that everyone transition to a central system. So I was hired to centralize LSA’s web presence under one platform, and I’ve been here ever since.
Q: Can you describe the work you do here at LSA Technology Services?
A: My team is centered around helping our customers optimize their processes and functions with different technology platforms. We help to install and maintain applications, both custom and packaged. Our goal is to always support more enterprise-wide than department-specific applications to benefit the whole college. Our team has developed processes that we use around user interface, usability, and accessibility when we work on applications for our customers. We work in three-week sprints to get everything done. Additionally, we manage some external vendors that host our applications—our WordPress platform is run on Pantheon, which is an external platform.
On the tech side, we have a .NET team for our large university platforms like Newnan’s advising appointments, the Faculty Lifecycle Tool, the Salary Budget Program, as well as the financial forecast. And then we have a Rails team that uses a different platform. They do some smaller applications but some big ones as well, like MClassrooms, OPS, the Visiting Scholars Program, as well as some applications for English, Math, and other departments. And then we have Sean Green’s team who helps manage our processes, testing, training, and lots of other activities as well as managing about 150 department websites on our Adobe platform and over 1,000 websites on WordPress.
Q: What does a typical day look like in your position?
A: A lot of meetings! I have a lot of direct reports, so I like to keep in touch with people. I try to understand and help manage the workflows and Jira boards across my teams. I can look at any given time to see what work has been done, what work needs to be done, and what work is still in the queue. This involves project management, one-on-one meetings, putting out fires, and trying to maintain a proactive approach to development. Standardization across the team is a major project right now. There are certain nuances to how we do things. We are trying to do more standardization and develop best practices across our teams. This means trying to do things efficiently and consistently across the teams, as well as reducing single-points of failure by doing things like paired programming.
Q: Is there a new project or new innovation happening in your area that you’re excited about?
A: AI is a big one. We’re starting to use AI more and more and have begun to experiment with it across our teams for optimizing and streamlining our code development. Github, our code repository, has a plugin that helps facilitate using AI to improve our code. We have some examples where our team did some programming that took half-an-hour with AI that would have normally taken a week and a half to complete without it. We see that as the future, and as a huge possibility to improve efficiency. It’s going to be big.
Q: What’s your favorite part of your job?
A: My team! I consider them an extension of my family. We have been blessed with low turnover and I’ve seen some of my team members get married, and have babies. I really care about them and I try to give them opportunities and help them out any way I can. That’s my favorite part of the job.
Q: What would be something that people would be surprised to learn about you?
A: I have four kids between the ages of 24 and 32. They are located in Atlanta, New York, Washington, D.C., and Detroit. I was in Scotland in May where I played golf 13 times in 11 days–I loved it! I have a cottage on Strawberry Lake which is on the Huron Chain of Lakes outside Dexter. I also love music.
Q: What do you like to do for fun outside of work?
A: Play golf and go boating. I like movies. I like to travel and visit my kids. I also like to be on the water whenever possible. I used to ski, but I broke my leg walking to work on an icy day a few years ago so I haven’t gone since. Last but not least, I love my dog—a black lab named Pike.
