Kudos & Congratulations

UIT staff recognized for their excellent work

• Thanks to the HR and Student teams in University Support Services, led by Doug Kenner and Pat Burton, for coordinating with the UIT-CIS team to upgrade to PeopleTools version 8.54.
• Marc Thompson and Ryan Hahn (USS) have done an awesome job getting our project time-tracking system set up in JIRA using Tempo - thanks to them for a quick turnaround!
• Thanks and welcome to Alijana Kahriman, our new administrative assistant in USS! Alijana has stepped up and learned so much in the past month - she has really organized and clean up the Park and Student Services Building areas.

~ Debbie Rakhsha, University Support Services

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Kudos to Paula Millington and Jill Brinton for their work on the Deloitte assessment. They have done an amazing job organizing the data and putting together the plan to move forward.

~ Ken Pink, Deputy CIO

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I'd like to give a big thanks to Amber Angell (CIS), Alijana Kahriman (USS), Calli Peterson (UC), and Debbie Rakhsha (USS) for volunteering to help StratComm at the 2015 UIT Holiday Party. All four arrived with smiles and good attitudes, and their help was invaluable throughout the party. Special thanks to Amber for stepping up to assist with some last minute needs, and to Calli for being our fabulous photographer!

~ Emily Rushton, UIT Strategic Communication

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Infrastructure services underpin all IT initiatives and often go underappreciated. I want to take a moment and recognize some of the great work that has been going on in Common Infrastructure Services (CIS). Infrastructure is at its best when users don't even realize we have been working. Below are some examples of things accomplished in just the past 45 days:

• Thank you to Chad Thurman for organizing the effort where 55 discrepant telcom manhole locations were surveyed by students in less than three weeks, so that the new conduit GIS map would be more correct.
• Thank you to Earl Lewis for organizing the enormous task of replacing the old wireless access points (APs) on campus. Earl, combined with network and professional services, has replaced and installed over 1,000 wireless APs in a month. They are on track to replace 600 more by early February.
• The Downtown Data Center Operations (DDCO) staff have been working for a number of months to bring Utah Transit Authority (UTA) into our facility. UTA has historically not worked in highly secured and structured data center environments, but DDC and UTA staff have now relocated a significant portion of UTA's infrastructure into the DDC. Most recently, DDC supported and relocated UTA's video archiving equipment. Working in close coordination, UTA and DDCO had all necessary infrastructure components in place and properly labeled for a smooth hardware installation. What had been scheduled as a five-hour project early on a Sunday morning was accomplished in approximately half the anticipated time with no residual issues.
• A big thank you to the network team who worked behind the scenes during the holidays to keep everything up and running and minimize impact to our customers. Special thanks to Ken Kizer and John Koolhoven, who worked Christmas Eve, and Adam Hughes and Curtis Larsen who worked New Year's Eve. In addition to that, Ken Kizer and Levi Conner covered issues on Christmas Day and New Year's Day, respectively.
• Thank you to all of the students within Common Infrastructure Services (CIS). They are doing great work and are a valuable addition to the department. Just one example is a shout-out to Ben Kulbertis who took the time to dig through making SNMP 3.0 work throughout our monitoring infrastructure and provide a documented approach. SNMP 3.0 is much more secure and essential to taking our monitoring to the next level. 
• Juniper complimented our network team in December, saying they had not seen a team that was so open and willing to learn and interact with each other to try to solve a problem.
• Thank you to Tim Goodale, Destry Mulleneaux, and Christian Johnson who have facilitated the cutover of more than 100 buildings to the new campus backbone. Most recently, the Moran cutover to the new backbone went smoothly and avoided impact to our critical clinical services.

~ Mike Ekstrom, Common Infrastructure Services

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Ellyx Jolley has been a student intern with the University Support Services (USS) QA/Release Management group since May 2015. She has consistently been one of the top performers, doing the most release moves on a weekly basis. Each week we recognize the student intern that does the most moves within our specified SLA, and of the 37 weeks Ellyx has been here she has had the top numbers nearly 40% of the time. 

Ellyx is always positive and contributes great ideas to the team. She volunteered to document our complex release process when we had to incorporate a new tool called “SourceTree” as part of it. She plays a key role in “onboarding” and mentoring new student interns starting with our group.

When her full-time team lead had to take a couple weeks off for medical reasons, Ellyx stepped up and covered things and kept everything running smoothly. She is an excellent tester and consistently finds critical bugs that are fixed before the development work makes it out to production. 

We frequently get compliments about Ellyx from the engineering team and especially the user groups that she helps support. She is a computer science student here at the U, slated to graduate May of 2017, and will be a great addition to any organization that is fortunate enough to hire her!  Kudos to Ellyx for being an outstanding student intern in the USS QA/Release Management group.

~ Dan Thornley, University Support Services

 

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