University of California, Berkeley

Terra.do

Senior Technical Project Manager

I took family leave from my long-term work in higher education to care for my son during COVID and to assess where to invest in the next phase of my life.  At some point, I hope to transition to address Climate Change.

Career Break

Career transition

Completed the Climate Change: Learning For Action program offered by Terra.do.  This is their flagship course: an intensive 12-week climate education and solutions bootcamp.

Professional development

🔸 Oversaw the IT Service Management (ITSM) program for UC Berkeley and maintained the ITSM strategic roadmap.  

🔸 Coordinated and aligned goals of the process owners for incident management, major incident management, service request fulfillment, change management, problem management, and the IT service catalog.  

🔸 Increased efficiency of IT Directors and Managers by designing visual dashboards tracking various KPIs: e.g., customer feedback scores, response time, and incident priority.

🔸 Product owner of the ITSM ServiceNow development.

ITSM Program Manager

As part of the replacement of a 30-year old Student Information System (SIS), I oversaw the development of various pieces of this $110M+ upgrade.

✅ Front-End Portal Development (CalCentral): Student Information System (SIS): Oversaw the development of the user-facing portal of the $110M Student Information System. Provided centralized access, views, notifications, enrollments, and activities for campus students, staff, instructors, advisors, and graduate students, instructors, and parents.  10.8M sessions per year in 2020.  This service was built on top of the Oracle/PeopleSoft Campus Solutions platform.

✅ Final Grades Service: Managed the end-to-end design of the Final Grades service for the Student Information System enabling grade distribution review (equity) across courses, department approval workflows, posting of final grades to students, and storage of the final grades into transcripts in the Registrar’s Office.  This provided course grades, overall GPA, transcripts, and the ability to apply for graduate school.  This service was built on top of the Oracle/PeopleSoft Campus Solutions platform.

✅ Refactored APIs into Microservices: Refactored and decoupled the critical APIs of the Student Information System (SIS) into microservices enabling faster updates of each unique API, reduced maintenance cost and regression testing, and reduced risk of causing inadvertent downstream effects.

✅ CalCentral Service Owner Transition: Transitioned the CalCentral service, documentation and infrastructure to the appropriate parties in a new department.

Senior Technical Project Manager, Student Information System

Oversaw the deployment of the new campus LMS and strategically enhanced other core education technology services.

✅ Campus Learning Management System (bCourses): Managed development and deployment of a new Learning Management System (LMS) for UC Berkeley --  the central location for syllabi, course objectives, class calendar, lecture videos, assignments, assignment submissions, assignment grades, discussion forums, quizzes, polls, and instructor feedback.  This enabled access to a state-of-the-art LMS platform as well as termination of the old platform along with its operational and maintenance costs.  The new LMS was built on the Canvas Platform.  9K course sites in 2020.

✅ Workflow Automation: Course Evaluation Service (OEC): Automated workflow of the OEC service reducing the service cost by 0.25 FTE of operational support and .15 FTE of service lead support.   Increased service quality by significantly reducing manual error by adding automation and business logic.  

✅ Service Redefinition: Lecture Recording Service: Successfully redefined the campus “lecture recording” service to meet new budget constraints.  This included new baseline service metrics, performance indicators, and projected success targets for the service including change management of the redefined service to campus customers.

Senior Technical Project Manager, Education Technology Services

Oversaw the prototype, pilot and deployment of the Telecom Catalog, a service request portal for Telecommunications Services.

✅ Service Request Prototype in ServiceNow: Managed a proof of concept prototype of the Voice Services Catalog and Service Request forms on the ServiceNow platform.  This validated the functionality of the ServiceNow platform given the business requirements

✅ Voice-services Service Request Portal (Telecom Catalog)
🔸 Individual Requests: Managed the development of the service request ordering, fulfillment workflow, and billing for all voice-related services for the campus -- around 30,000 employees: gateways, switches, routers, desktop phones, voicemail, cell phones, cabling, etc.  This provided a centralized, efficient and standardized platform for end users and the Voice Services staff.

🔸 Bulk / Project Requests: Managed the service request submission and tracking workflow for bulk voice and data service orders along with their integration into a new billing system.  This saved users and technicians significant time by enabling users to submit a single telecommunication request for bulk moves instead of submitting individual requests for each item; it also allowed technicians to track, document, and notify bulk effort within a single service request.

Senior Technical Project Manager, Telecommunication Services

Managed a three-year, international, multi-institutional (120+) planning project to identify and assess technology needs of humanities faculty in higher education. The planning project resulted in the Bamboo Technology Project.  Both projects were funded by the Mellon Foundation.

✅  Project Bamboo: Managed a three-year, international, multi-institutional (120+) planning project to identify and assess the technology needs of humanities-focused faculty in higher education, and to build an implementation roadmap and work plan to meet those needs.  Oversaw the goals, design and facilitation of ten workshops (600+ participants).  This resulted in a successfully funded Bamboo Technology Project proposal. This project was funded with $683K by the Mellon Foundation.

✅  Tools, Services and Collections Registry: Bamboo Technology Project: Managed the scoping and implementation of a technology and digital collection catalog relevant to humanities-focused scholars for an international, multi-institutional collaboration funded with $1.293M by the Mellon Foundation.

✅  Tools and Services Registry:  Developed a local, community-sourced, campus technology catalog of digital tools and services leveraged at UC Berkeley.  This registry listed and described each tool as well as provided ratings, reviews, contextual use cases, and threaded discussion.

Senior Technical Project Manager, Project Bamboo

Oversaw highly complex, campus-wide IT projects for the Office of the CIO at UC Berkeley.

✅ Central IT Relocation and Building Renovation (BIT): Renovated and made work-ready the new 🏢 working home for the Office of the CIO and central IT for UC Berkeley.   Centralized most central IT departments to a single venue, standardized their AV/virtual hardware, terminated 2 leases from non-university-owned property, and restored the campus “surge space” required to relocate other campus departments undergoing building renovations.  Project Management oversight of $1.283M.

✅ bSecure Firewall Migration and Preventative Security: Managed a joint project deployed by both the 🛜 Network and 🔐 Security teams that enabled real-time updates of global cyberattacks and proactive network containment or blocks against those attacks.  12.9M critical threats blocked by bSecure VPN in 2020.

✅  Closure: Survey Technology and Services (STS) Unit: 🌇 Closed down a famous but no longer financially viable campus unit that had an annual structural deficit.  Successfully transferred assets, national customers, and IP rights to an outside foundation. Closure of this unit was unsuccessfully attempted twice before.

✅ IT Service Provider Billing Service: Managed the 💵 billing upload and data validation that enabled the monthly billing of $2.7M by central IT service providers to their campus clients.  This included mapping the services and fees to a new billing system. 

✅ Box Service Deployment: Managed the configuration and deployment of the Box 📂 files sharing and storage service.  This was the first enterprise deployment of a ☁️ cloud service from central IT at UC Berkeley.

Senior Technical Project Manager, CIO Strategic Initiatives

Masters of Information Management and Systems at the iSchool at UC Berkeley.  Minor in User-Centered Design.

Given the recession, 25% of all LBNL positions were cut across the board.

Layoff/position eliminated

Coordinated technical projects for the Engineering and Nuclear Science Divisions of a Department of Energy Laboratory.

* STAR Project: Central point-of-contact for a $50-million international physics project.
* JobBOSS: ERP deployment across 25 fabrication shops which make everything designed by LBNL.

Rich Meyer