Elizabeth Thomas Email & Phone Number

Saint Paul, Mn, Us

Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States

Supported a global Agile Kanban team of 17 DevOps and Middleware Engineers to provide complete middleware builds to teams across enterprise-wide hosted infrastructure and support to our most critical products for both internal and external-facing applications. Managed customer interaction to ensure prompt service and escalation of critical projects.Analyzed current processes and identified several blockers, bottlenecks, and points at which work was otherwise interrupted based on external factors. Consulted with customers and leadership to create new processes to reduce or eliminate these issues and decrease cycle time by 15%.Collaborated with our engineers, customers, and leadership to create clear and comprehensive policy and procedures documentation. Created a completely new engagement process, and redesigned our confluence space and Jira collector. This resulted in increased process transparency and reduced requests for work outside of the purview of the team by 60%.Managed customer inquiries, escalations, and cancellations by creating standardized correspondence and timelines to ensure consistency of communication regarding progress, completion, and blockers leading to increased customer confidence and faster resolution of issues preventing project completion.Facilitated negotiation with multiple Lines of Business to ensure correct priority of tasks and reasonable delivery expectations resulting in increased customer comprehension of current workloads and decreased escalations for urgent projects outside of established and published procedures.Identified blockers while items were still in our backlog and worked with engineers to identify and complete prerequisite work which led to a 70% backlog reduction for a JIRA Kanban team without reduction in volume of incoming requests.

Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States

Created and implemented a centralized vulnerability management process for 9 middleware engineering teams and led a team of engineers and analysts using Agile and Kanban methodologies to ensure all reported vulnerabilities were resolved, updated in respective reporting tools, and validated when required. Developed a completely new and consistently evolving process for gathering, analyzing, distributing, and reporting vulnerability data to our engineering teams resulting in a reduction of vulnerability escalations to zero for all teams.Hosted Agile and Kanban ceremonies, identified team strengths, and created internal records to capture minutes, blockers, and suggestions that resulted in improved internal processes and exceptional team cooperation and support.Leveraged available tools and regular feedback from engineering teams to build reporting templates that provided concise, accurate, and actionable information leading to greater understanding of requirements and increased engagement.Composed complete process documentation to ensure cross-functionality of the team and regularly reviewed our documentation for functionality, clarity, and accuracy. Mentored other vulnerability management teams with adapting our processes to their specific needs.Organized weekly meetings with engineering teams to examine vulnerability data, review resolution information, identify blockers, and provide updates resulting in greater accountability and faster resolution of critical issues.Represented and advocated for our middleware engineering teams within the larger vulnerability operations organization in enterprise-wide meetings to ensure that any irregularities in reporting were flagged, engineer concerns were addressed or escalated, and potential escalations were addressed.

Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States

Supported a team of software engineers and developers with application hosting, middleware patching, and the implementation of automation using Puppet and Ansible.Managed Pac2000 for two engineering teams and assisted with creating, approving, and assigning change requests. Ensured prompt resolution for problem tickets and assisted with root cause assessments and necessary action to prevent downtime for our most crucial applications.Provided process analysis and documentation and assisted our principal engineer with presenting and proposing major process improvements to senior leadership at the CTO level resulting in the adoption of major upgrades to enterprise-wide hosted infrastructure.Onboarded and assisted new team members with system access, equipment, familiarity with available facilities and workplace accommodations to decrease manager workload and streamlined the onboarding process leading to accelerated availability of new hires to fully contribute to the team.Assisted current team members with equipment and software requisition, system access, facility scheduling, and training. Created and published documentation for these processes ensuring that all team members had clear and accurate instructions, eliminating the need for individual research and duplicated efforts.