Sam Storie Email and Phone Number

In late 2018 I was promoted to the role of Director for my current team. My primary responsibilities as Director include: - Leading a team of 24 management, software and support professionals ranging in experience from interns to 25+ year employees in both the US and Beijing, China - Ensure my team provides software and tools to collect manufacturing data in a reliable, trusted fashion, and ensure that data is always available for our internal customers. This footprint includes roughly 150 applications, 850 manufacturing PCs and a 1.9TB clustered SQL Server deployment. - Providing strategic direction and tactical guidance to execute a project portfolio of typically 5-10 active projects at any given time - Manage an expense budget of approximately $800k that includes software license and contractor expense management - Be a liaison between my manufacturing customers and the Emerson IT organization so initiatives are understood and business input is considered In my tenure as Director, I have been able to lead several meaningful improvements: - Drafted a team vision and yearly strategic plan that helps create purpose and engagement for a software team within a manufacturing company - Executed an expansion of co-op, part time & contract resources to execute more projects on time when full time headcount has been limited - Expanded the use of our Beijing team to increase the capacity of my team and ultimately get more project work done faster - Expanded the use of observability tools and metrics to enable a relatively small team to keep our systems available with less effort - Creating an Operational Data Store focused on turning existing global data repositories into more usable information for internal engineers - Hire, retain & promote several individuals that have proven key to building a self-driven team that consistently delivers value to our customers

In my role at Rosemount I have been responsible for designing, implementing and executing a strategy to move our software landscape towards an API-powered service oriented architecture. This work has required methodical planning, clear communication to several levels of the organization, and providing both technical and non-technical support to my teammates working to implement the strategy. During this work we have added important capabilities like continuous integration using TeamCity, Elasticsearch for structured logging and Prometheus metrics for service health monitoring. We have also worked to update our software practices to include a migration to Git for source control and Gitlab for easier work management and code reviews. All these initiatives have required effective change management to ensure the team remains successful, while making strategic decisions about what improvements make sense for Rosemount. This strategy is now enabling new possibilities to upgrade legacy applications without fully re-writing them, which has been a long-standing pain point. It is also allowing my team to provide software capabilities to other groups of Rosemount that previously would have not been considered.

I was hired by MillerCoors on a part-time basis to help build software tools to improve their ability to identify and track material loss during the brewing process. This work was split over 3 engagements to first create an initial toolset, then expand it to another part of the brewing process, and work started on expanding it yet again before funding was cut due to market conditions. This was a great opportunity to “parachute” into a situation, work to understand what a customer needed, and deliver value in a relatively short time. This work was completed during the off-hours of my regular position at Emerson (which was uninterrupted).

I joined Feed Management Systems, which is a company Cargill acquired in 2010, to help them develop enterprise level software to manage feed mill operations and feed recipe formulation. My initial work required rapidly learning their internal development platform and the 3rd party Modularis Accelerator Platform. My contributions helped turn around a struggling project that was adding new cost functionality to their existing Pennet Mill Manager product. I then became a lead developer on a 10-month project to upgrade Brill, their feed formulation product, using .NET on top of their internal development platform. This project involved revamping the C# and WinForms-based platform to use the MVP design pattern with mediators as the communication framework. In my role at FMS routinely mentor other developers, openly share my ideas for feedback, and always look for ways to increase the impact I can have on the organization. My contributions were recognized in the summer of 2014 when I received the company-wide FMS “All Star” award. This award is given to one person each year within FMS, requires a nomination by your peers to be eligible, and is ultimately chosen by the FMS leadership team.

To better understand the challenges faced by a business unit implementing the Tartan solution I have taken a temporary assignment helping the Horizon Milling BU manage their material master data. I focus on developing efficient tools and processes to make data management more intuitive and cheaper. I have expanded the .NET/WPF data conversion tool I created in my previous role to include functionality for managing duplicate materials, identifying materials with known issues, and providing material metadata in an efficient manner. This role has broadened my perspective on the challenges a customer of Tartan faces, and has helped me focus my skills to better meet their needs.

This role in Tartan allowed me to positively impact the organization in many ways. My first opportunity was to lead the selection of SAP Data Services as the ETL tool for Tartan data conversion work. I then developed the guidelines for how Data Services code would be developed, and how our server and database infrastructure would be used to execute concurrent Tartan projects. I then designed and implemented a C# application, written using .NET and WPF, which provides efficient reporting functionality unique to SAP data conversions. This work required initiative and courage to solve issues that were not apparent to my teammates and leadership. Within Tartan I routinely provided technical support to my peers for different issues and technologies, including a team of contractors working in India. I was also able to influence other teams’ accountability through candid conversations about the services they provide. This required discussions with people both at, and above, my level in the organization to find ways to partner more effectively. This role consistently required critical thinking, communicating effectively to a multiple levels of the organization, collaborating with multiple teams, turning setbacks into opportunities, and proactively identifying and solving problems.

As a supervisor in Grain IT I built upon my experience as a team lead and increased my responsibilities to around 18 staff, including two team leads being groomed for a supervisor role. I had responsibility to hire a number of new employees, enabling me to have a long lasting impact on Cargill. I continued to lead change by expanding work planning in all parts of Grain IT, and to an IT organization located in Canada. This work planning helped Grain IT understand and increase its capacity, while helping us meet the commitments we had already made to our customers. I increased the culture of innovation by pushing my DBA team to build a software framework to automatically manage our database accounts for all teams within Grain IT. This reduced the work effort required to remain compliant with Cargill’s password policies, and provided a working example of how collaboration within Grain IT can solve problems more efficiently. I also partnered with our business customers to uncover and fix some serious data issues in an application used to compute compensation incentives for a sales staff. This effort required a candid and transparent approach from my team to ensure the business understood the issues and felt confident we were taking the right steps to correct them.

As a team lead in Grain IT I continued my efforts to change the culture of the DBA team. In my role I provided work planning and strategy for my DBA team, helped identify new talent by interviewing prospective candidates, and provided coaching and technical expertise to both my team and others within Grain IT. These experiences let me better understand the needs of Grain IT, and find innovative ways for the DBA team to help meet them. One example was making large strides to increase the transparency, communication and collaboration between my team and others both inside and outside of Grain IT. A major accomplishment for me was leading an 8-month project to upgrade our systems from ASE 12.5 on HP to ASE 15.0.3 on AIX on time. A second major accomplishment was working with Sybase, our database vendor, over a 12 month period to simplify our database licensing to ensure we were compliant and that the licensing was easier to understand for future supervisors within Grain IT.

As a DBA in Grain IT I was responsible for maintaining a replicated database environment composed of 100+ servers running Sybase ASE and Replication Server. In this role I identified many opportunities to make my team more efficient and increase the capabilities of my team. I worked with my teammates to create new tools and processes, and was able to increase the agility and capacity of the DBA team while also reducing the time required to maintain the environment. I routinely demonstrated ways to change how we work, with the goal to push my team to be more proactive in fixing the root cause of issues instead of “fire fighting”.

In my last 18 months at Rosemount I was a supervisor for two employees, with a third scheduled to start after I decided to join Cargill. In this role I was responsible for providing work direction, hiring staff and conducting salary and performance reviews. I also had experience coaching underperformers to raise the execution capacity of my team. Because of the size of my team, I spent a sizable portion of my time as an individual contributor despite my additional supervision responsibilities. This provided good experience managing multiple priorities and executing in different capacities depending on the situation.

As a software engineer I led the development of several applications that improved the manufacturing process. Most work was done with C# and VB 6, but I also developed a PHP intranet site providing engineers with a tool suite for accessing production data through a web interface. I also took a lead role in improving software development practices by using Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server to implement a modified CMMI process. As a database administrator I helped build and maintain a replicated Sybase database backend that supported a large-scale manufacturing plant in the US and Beijing, China. My responsibilities included both the server infrastructure and the administration of Sybase ASE and Replication Server.

In my second year of graduate school I was awarded a research assistant position. In my research I pioneered techniques that dynamically adapt computationally intensive distributed applications. The results included two conference accepted papers, my graduate thesis, and a C++ library that uses XML, STL and a multi-threaded design to dynamically adapt high performance applications at run-time.

During my first year of graduate school I was awarded a teaching assistant position. In this role I designed and conducted laboratory sessions, graded homework and exams, and helped students with any concerns for both a Computer Networks and Computer Architecture course.