Kudos & Congratulations

Congratulations to Joe Breen and Jayci Minjares for winning the September 2017 prize drawing!

UIT staff recognized for their excellent work

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I’d like to thank Bryan Morris (Network and Core) for being instrumental to the PMO as we begin taking responsibility for managing new U construction projects on UIT’s behalf. Bryan has only been in his new role managing the account executives for one month, and is already having a tremendous positive impact on the success of our projects.

I would like to thank the entire team who worked on the successful 9.2 upgrade. A special shoutout to Piotr Pawlikowski as the project manager.

~ Jill Brinton, Project Management Office

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Chris Livingston gets constant praise. One of the compliments I recently heard about Chris was, "He just takes ownership of the problem and sticks with it. He'll tell you that he owns it until he can prove that it's outside his span of control." That's exactly how it should be. 

~ Chris Stucker, Facility Operations

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Thank you to Jill Brinton and her PMs Jody Sluder and Jayci Minjares for the value that they have provided to my team and our projects. You are truly appreciated!!!

Thank you to Emily Rushton for helping the Web Hosting Services team with assisting with our communication efforts on migrating our customer sites to a supported platform.

Thank you to the following infrastructure teams for all the dedication and countless hours put into preparing the back end systems for a successful PeopleSoft FS Upgrade: Database (Rob Birkinshaw, Arnie Carter, Robert Jans, Brad Millet), PS Middle Tier (Joe Massaro, Rhay Natividad, Matt Leatham), and Web App Deployment & Automation Team (Thanh Nguyen). A big kudos also goes out to the USS team for all their dedication, effort and hard work. Thank you Val Olds for all your coordination and communication efforts on this.

~ Kim Tanner, Software Platform Services

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Kevin Taylor Service Award committee members Shellie Eide, Bryan Morris, Peter Panos, and Rachael Sheedy deserve a round of applause for all the time, energy, and goodwill they devoted to the Taylor Award this year. They did a great job leading up to the meeting and during the presentation. People who knew Kevin came up to me after the event and remarked that they felt glad to remember him in such a positive way, and that you did a terrific job. Thanks also to Emily Rushton and Jesse Drake for their support again this year.

~ Cassandra Van Buren, Strategic Communication

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Due to the amazing efforts of the Software Platform Services Team, we were recently able to successfully complete our first Oracle Exadata "rolling” patch in production. Applying updates with this method significantly or in some cases completely eliminates the system downtime often associated with this type of maintenance. Previously, we would have to coordinate system outage periods up to 24 hours in some cases. This new method of applying Oracle Exadata maintenance will have a huge positive impact on the availability of the services we provide. Huge thanks to Kim Tanner’s group including Brad Millett, Rob Birkenshaw, Rob Jans, Arnie Carter, Thanh Nguyen, Matt Leatham, Joe Massaro, and Rhay Natividad for their efforts on this initiative.

~ Jason Moeller, University Support Services and Ken Pink, Deputy CIO

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Shout-out to Peter Monson, from Network and Communications Infrastructure, for always being willing to help me with anything, any time I ask. He's awesome!

~ Emily Rushton, UIT Strategic Communication

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Vijay Kammili (Voice Systems) has been an incredible resource during the rollout of our Work Force Optimization project. He has been patient, responsive, accessible and diligent throughout the process, and we could not have asked for a higher level of professionalism and help throughout! He has our full appreciation.

~ Joshua Butterfield, Manager of WorkForce Management, Care Navigation, University of Utah Health

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I would like to acknowledge the great work of the UIT PMO. Earl Lewis, Piotr Pawlikowski, Jill Brinton, Jayci Minjares, Jody Sluder, Rachael Sheedy, and Clay Postma have provided a great deal of support on critical projects over the past months. I want to especially recognize Earl and Piotr for their taking on some of the in-flight construction projects with critical challenges and working through them meticulously. Kudos!

~ Mike Ekstrom, Network and Communications Infrastructure

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Emily Rushton and Jesse Drake from the Strategic Communication group are awesome. They are some of the easiest people in the office to rely on due to their "If I don’t know, I’ll find out" mentality. For example, I requested something from Jesse that was an oddball request and told him that if I could get the answer in a couple days I would be happy. 20 minutes later I had the request fulfilled. Thanks to a great team.

~ Peter Monson, Network and Communications Infrastructure

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I would like to recognize Stan Clements for his amazing work in bringing together all curriculum-related exam services under the Uonline center. If you know Stan, you know that his personality is geared towards constant improvement and striving to do what is best for students and faculty. In this case, Stan and his staff have put up in extra hours to make sure that the adoption of Scantron services went smoothly here on campus. They’ve had to adapt practices, learn new technologies, and come up to speed on the intricacies of OMR machines and answer-sheet smears. Their resilience through the technical and logistical challenges have been exemplary.

~ Jon Thomas, Teaching and Learning Technologies

 

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