Dave Baumgardner Email & Phone Number

Rochester, Minnesota, United States

Manage IBM’s response to highly critical, business impacting emergencies and outages affecting client’s ability to run their business and/or client facing operations. Gather and lead the required technical teams needed to resolve crisis and escalate internally as required. Act as a single point of contact to client’s management providing communication during the duration of the event and subsequent return to operations. Update IBM Executives via verbal and written communications throughout event lifecycle.

Rochester, Minnesota, United States

Led 25 senior level technical resources (matrix over 125) including IT architects, chief storage architect, program and executive project managers and lead IT specialists covering compute, network, and storage. Owned architecture, new development, steady state operations, change management, and hardware and software technology refreshes used by 400 clients across 16 worldwide data centers with annual revenue of $348M. Included 4.4K servers, 25K client and infrastructure virtual machines, 2.7K network devices, 125K network ports, 30K storage area network ports and 800 storage devices totaling over 50 Petabytes. • Designed and built standardized engagement process used by cross functional team of 2K people decreasing chaos, employee burnout, requester frustration greatly improving workflow, team productivity and boosted client satisfaction.• Led overhaul of 24x7 alerting massively removing false positives by thousands per month. Drew focus to “real” alerts and client-initiated incidents improving response to clients and infrastructure issues. • Introduced Agile practices to track and plan team initiatives and hardware break/fix activity, allowing better work prioritization, tracking, resource balancing and utilization while transitioning work to follow-the-sun model.• Conducted weekly global leader working sessions consisting of 25 people across 10 technical teams to plan, coordinate and discuss critical hardware/software/changes across infrastructure, providing visibility to ongoing complex initiatives consisting of hundreds of man hours and millions of dollars in hardware and software. • Created and led ‘Automation Council’ to solicit, define, evaluate, prioritize, and execute on ideas from cross-functional technical leaders, enhancing employee engagement and efficiency. Diminished months’ worth of work to couple hours through server health checking script and server password changing script.

Rochester, Minnesota, United States

Directed 35 level 3 developers located in India, Romania, and USA. Coordinated solving of problem tickets and fixing defects in Cloud Managed Services application code solving hundreds of configuration and environment issues and numerous code defects per month. • Initiated and drove collaborative relationships with development and support teams to optimize effectiveness by concentrating on best practices and activities to eliminate friction points. Developed ‘must gather’ documents to ensure required data is supplied to perform investigative work. Eliminated rework, churn, and lessened overall time to resolve. • Led daily scrum meetings to prioritize urgent/critical software issues impacting production to closure.• Developed, promoted, and administered knowledge base to document problems and solutions, decreasing rediscovery work and solution time and enabling support teams to resolve more problems quickly and without assistance. • Defined best practices and processes to align work to best resource based on skill set and labor cost, increasing team’s effectiveness and raising satisfaction of support teams and clients. • Inserted functionality into provisioning code to generate incident if automation failed allowing concentrated investigation and to retry function versus failing entire provisioning operation. Enabled team to resolve problems before clients were impacted and improved provisioning success rates and client satisfaction.

Rochester, Minnesota, United States

Managed numerous teams of software engineers in covering multiple technology areas. Debugged highly technical issues affecting large client production environments. Worked with software development team to communicate code defects and supply data required to develop and deliver fixes.• Handled hiring, training, conflict resolution, performance evaluations and delivered continuous feedback to staff. Received 100% employee satisfaction results on yearly Employee/Manager surveys. • Devised Support Center processes which achieved highest client satisfaction year over year while delivering lowest hours per problem and high engineer utilization.• Led requirements definition of work assignment tool that weighed work available on live-call queues factored with each engineer’s backlog and commitments. Distributed work based on team goals and individual client commitments, meeting and exceeding aggressive delivery targets.• Facilitated and oversaw numerous serviceability tools allowing support teams to quickly debug problems by aiding in collecting data and performing analysis of issues while saving numerous hours of deep manual analysis and closing critical client issues quickly.• Managed creation and population of robust knowledgebase of numerous ‘how to’ documents and issues with corresponding resolutions, resulting in less time rediscovering problems and call avoidance enabling clients to self-serve.• Developed and performed soft-skills training to over 300+ software engineers, leading to higher client satisfaction results on client surveys.• Coordinated creation of education road maps and certification exams for each team ensuring engineers demonstrated required skills to properly support clients and grow careers.• Partnered with development teams to deepen engineer’s skills, decreasing number of non-defect issues sent to development team.• Scheduled and led weekly meeting for 25 team leaders communicating initiatives and helping solve issues and concerns.