Candidates About

Ronald j. Mccullough

SUMMARY

An IT Data Center Operations Manager with a team player process centric approach, a working infrastructure knowledge base and talents in directing and motivating technical staff. I attend to departmental operations, project planning and co-ordination of activities; help desk integration. My focus is on staff and driving the reliability of systems and by extension data & application availability. Adept at leading teams & ad-hoc teams in both operational and engineering process in line with operational budgets and time lines (SLAs). Evaluate proposals from lines of business in the light of needs and available resources, providing practical recommendations for hardware/software solutions. Affiliative, democratic, coaching and authorative management styles as needed, with strong communication and interpersonal skills that are effective with both senior management and staff.

WORK EXPERIENCE

JCPenney, Plano, Texas · 03/09/2015-10/06/2017 – Household retailer, clothing, jewelry, interior design

Capacity Planner (Lead Eng.) for Virtualized Infrastructure, OSI layers 1 through 4, and named applications

·         Re-engineered Remedy workflow process as it applied to Infrastructure Engineering using a SIPOC process.

·         Provide capacity planning analysis for virtualized machines and supporting infrastructure.

·         Assisted in the implementation of Zabbix; eight months later assisted in the removal of Zabbix.

·         Began the set-up of SNMP data capture supporting planning analysis for OSI layers 1 - 4 using Zabbix and other tools.

·         After the Zabbix back out used SolarWinds, TeamQuest, CA-Wily, Oracle OEM, AWR reports for data capture and analysis.

Verizon/Terremark, Cary, North Carolina · 08/06/2012-03/06/2015 – Provider of cloud/computer infrastructure

Lead Spec-Technical (Tactical Resource Manager/Global Support Desk Work Flow)

·         Supervised ingestion & prioritization of work for a 15-member 12 hour overnight and weekend local shift as well as other staff in Taiwan, Hyderabad and Chennai India, Dortmund Germany, and Great Britain. Used Change Advisory Board schedules, Remedy/ETMS systems, phone, walkups & email to accomplish this.

·         Worked the change management process ensuring that changes were assigned, validated by the assigned administrator, and approved per the Change Advisory Board’s process, more critically made sure they started and ended on time; when required worked with customer/service representatives and if need be customer designated POCs for time extensions.

·         Managed Crisis Notification Report events; providing escalation status reporting and situation management services; created time lines and initial root cause analysis reports

·         Maintained communications with TRMs across shifts; coordinated technical staff efforts and communications as required – kept the engineering staff, (Network, Unix/Linux, Windows administrators and DBA) focused on first things first - return to service and change work. Understood and shared process definitions and discipline – attention paid to details entered into Remedy/ETMS tickets and change documentation work logs.

·         Distributed work input from multiple ticketing systems, Remedy, ETMS, & automated monitoring systems across multiple domains around the globe while adhering to SLAs in support of American Airlines, JetBlue, HealthCare.gov, BestBuy and several Pacific rim firms.

·         Facing 100 strategic, non-strategic clients/internal groups over multiple data centers (India(2), Germany, USA(3)) with competing workloads & support functions steered & monitored the distribution of work across technical groups consisting of Windows/Citrix, UNIX/Linux, ESX/VM, Networking, Storage, DBA (Oracle, DB2, MSSQL/SQL and MySQL) teams.

·         Produced periodic reports and ad-hoc reports as needed hourly, every four hours and end of shift summaries;

·         Stressed communication and interpersonal relations and relationship building (ad-hoc teaming).

Berninger Coram & McCullough Technologies, Wilson, North Carolina · 07/2010- 08/2012 – to be a Purveyor of highly secure private cloud and business continuity services for independent professionals

Manager, CEO

·         Developed business, marketing/sales approach with Sr. UNIX Admin. as CTO and a marketing director as CMO.  

·         Sought venture capital for a PaaS venture. Failed to raise capital (unacceptable terms) bringing endeavor to a halt

·         Developed technical infra-structure architecture w/software stacks

·         Discussed co-location of equipment and direct internet backbone access with Greenlight of Wilson, NC while working with the Upper Coastal Plain Development Corp. seeking start-up dollars and facilities.  

·         Outlined sales staff acquisition and development, defined remuneration and tracking plan.Set HR philosophy.

·         Developed a thin client and identity management solution.

·         Learned about HIPAA and other client challenges, related incentives and opportunities.  

·         Preliminary accounting support/tax services arranged.

Research Triangle Institute (RTI) International, Durham, North Carolina · 10/13/2008-11/06/2009 - Global non-profit research and development firm serving both government and corporate clients.

Manager of Server Operations

·         Directed a nine-member infrastructure/server team, supporting the operation of 400 servers & 2 SAN pools spread across production & local disaster recovery sites using VMware ESXi virtualization services underpinning Microsoft Server and Red Hat Linux platforms.

·         Established the unit’s tactical direction, started a service catalog, reviewed & documented operational procedures.

·         Proactively identified opportunities to engage the group in the support of projects across functional areas.

·         Designed, implemented a method/solution in support of patching work specifically related to federal contracts.

·         Cultivated the team’s communication and relationship building efforts within the organization, improving efficiency, optimizing and quickening the team’s service delivery;

·         Brought brain storming and team building exercises to the group, encouraged the use of these techniques.

·         Dealt with a solo performer vs. a team work approach which took the better part of a year to clean up; had to address and correct poor work practices.

Key Operational Achievements:

·         Reduced help desk ticket backlogs server and storage, improving overall client service by fostering communicative relationships between the server operations and help desk teams; accomplished, in no small part by carefully developing a working relationship with the help desk management and team leads.

·         Reduced the average number of pending archival requests at month’s end by 92% by addressing a staff performance issue and by implementing a train-the-trainer method for streamlining this process.

·         Instituted a cross training approach to incident resolution to increase staff flexibility.

·         Transformed the server operations group into a cohesive, performing team. This achieved through establishing accountability among staff, introduction of a training matrix, set performance benchmarks, and began the implementation of ITIL v3 principles in operations planning.

·         Contracted a DBA in one week (it had taken others four months to not hire one).

·         Automated and documented the ongoing audits of federally funded server patching process – reducing turnaround time and eliminating follow up questions on the part of the auditors.

Key IT Project Achievements:

·         Delivered a facility/building server and staff relocation with zero unplanned downtime. Minimized risk to server and related assets with careful planning, check lists, team walk-throughs and select server by server rehearsals.

·         Bolstered the unit’s physical-to-virtual support link(s) with engineering, enhancing cross-functional teaming, while cutting costs, improving staff capabilities with the migration of 24 platforms to a VMware infrastructure.

·         Enabled a significant improvement to the International Group’s account support function, for which the team received multiple accolades, by implementing a Skype solution to international service requests.

BB&T, Wilson, North Carolina · 05/12/1997-01/17/2008 - A bank with over $120B in assets.

Vice President / Senior Architect / Strategic Planning Analyst (06/01/2002-2008)

·         Transferred into the CTO’s office to identify opportunities to decrease cost & minimize risk for infrastructure efforts.

·         Assessed technologies aiding compliance with emerging corporate and regulatory mandates.

·         Evaluated Linux for the banks use. Had a significant role in the selection of a distribution for implementation.

·         Led an architectural process for banking solutions focused on UNIX/Linux + Oracle/DB2 database environments.

Strategic Contributions:

·         Strategized and consulted with business leaders on establishing practices and practical applications for distributed systems, tiered data storage, operating system release management, and data recovery.

·         Assisted in bringing compliance to Sarbanes-Oxley/Basil II & other guidelines for records management.

·         Modernized the corporate approach to distributed data storage launching a tiered storage and services plan.

·         Spearheaded the system architecture for an application relating to commercial risk grading, check imaging, deposit statement development, processing services, and treasury services reporting.

Manager of UNIX Engineering & Operations (05/12/1997-05/2002) - Built a team from 2 members to 10 to address a significant project load, reducing it to 5 permanent staff through contracting before hiring. Directed the efficient provisioning of services, support, & administration for this core system support unit. Drove planning, prioritization, and management of projects while optimizing our processes for resolving and tracking system performance issues.

Key IT Project Achievements:

·         Drove system uptime to 99%, reducing unplanned UNIX outages 95%. Cut resolution times from hours to minutes by stabilizing server configurations, patching cadence and analyzing, overhauling the incident handling approach.

·         Appropriately sized and configured application infrastructure for a mission-critical teller automation project creating a process adopted for use in implementing future regulatory mandated initiatives, Sarbanes-Oxley and Basil II.

·         Consistently achieved defined goals for high profile initiatives seeing to the implementation of 35 systems across 2 sites over 18 months including branch automation, mortgage origination and loan servicing.

·         Effectively supported mergers and acquisitions during a period of rapid growth, ensuring achievement of all service level agreements (SLAs) while maintaining the standards of the corporate change control process.

Education, Training and Evolution

Bachelor of Arts Economics & Musicology - Grinnell College, Grinnell, Iowa

ITIL v3 Foundations Certification - Quint Wellington Redwood, 2009