Leadership

Transformational

With a background in IT and a career focus on website development and cloud migration consulting, I identify with a transformational leadership style. It emphasizes vision, adaptability, and inspiring change - qualities crucial in the fast-paced tech industry. Further, it highlights that successful digital transformation involves both technical and cultural shifts, requiring engagement with diverse stakeholders and a clear, motivating vision. My collaborative approach empowers teams, encourages continuous learning, and drives sustainable, long-term innovation aligned with transformational leadership principles.

Prime TSR

Iceberg

2021-2022

While leading our AWS Well-Architected Framework Review practice for our clients, it occurred to me that the cloud infrastructure scanning tool we were using, nOps, left a lot on the table with regard to capabilities. At this time, there was a growing category of services that would scan cloud environments for infrastructure resource utilization and spending - and that was it. They outputted convenient reports, but left you to make of it what you could.

If we were going through the effort of conducting these WAFR engagements - landing the project, conducting multiple meetings, asking a battery of questions, thinking through deep analysis, etc., why not include even more in our report? For example, how about misconfigurations, anti-patterns, and security risks? After extensive research, there didn't appear to be a tool that could accomplish those objectives (to their credit, this was 2020 and the services have come a long way since then). By this time, our team was well versed in best-practices, so why not automate it? We automate everything else in our roles, so it would save us time better spent helping our clients in other ways.

I saw an opportunity to build a tool that could do just that. Thus, Iceberg was born!

Iceberg was a first-of-its-kind cloud infrastructure scanning/analysis tool that could not only report on cost optimization, but also security best-practices, configuration issues, and performance improvements. One interesting aspect of doing the WAFRs was that more often than not, it would be a CFO as our project sponsor. They would come to us concerned by the company's cloud spend while trying to figure out why it was out of control. For that, we wanted to keep them in the conversation - so the icing on the Iceberg cake was being able to build out interactive dashboards that truly spoke to a non-technical, C-level audience. When using that lens, Iceberg left out all the techno-babble, included easy-to-understand visuals, and focused on clear, actionable insights.

The project didn't happen overnight though. First, I had to make the case. While my WAFR colleague and I were able to quickly get a proof-of-concept up and running, we needed buy-in from leadership to allocate resources. After several presentations and discussions, we secured the necessary support. Next came development, which involved finding and managing any spare developer resources we could get. Then we conducted iterative testing and refinement based on feedback from initial users, incorporating telemetry when possible. Finally, we launched Iceberg as part of our consulting services as a value-add, and it quickly became an asset for our clients, helping them at multiple levels to optimize their cloud infrastructure effectively.

Purohit Navigation

Adobe InCopy Workflow

2018

Similar to the Elasticsearch project referenced on the Engineering page, this was another example of a workflow related project where I "managed up". At the agency, we worked in a waterfall methodology which led to inefficiencies and delays on a daily basis. As an extreme example for a brand new product launch, our digital team couldn't start coding until:

1. The client's internal regulatory body approved the work. Which couldn't start until:
2. The complete layout was finalized. Which couldn't finish until:
3. The design assets were finalized. Which couldn't finish until:
4. The copy was finalized. Which couldn't start until:
5. The brand language and overall campaign messaging were finalized. Which couldn't start until:
6. Drug trials, research data, and FDA or adjacent regulatory approvals were finalized and approved.

It was impossible to not see the pain of colleagues struggling with the workflow. Also, as the digital department was last in the pecking order for project completion, we would occasionally get our timelines compressed due to other stages taking up more time than planned. With that in mind, I decided to leverage my technical and operational experience to pitch an idea: what if the art team AND the copy team could work simultaneously rather than sequentially?

For my team, it was brutal watching a project come down the pipeline like a slow-moving freight train and there was little we could do to get ahead of it. The best we could hope for was to wait until the project was somewhat down the tracks and do some rough layouts with placeholder content. Beyond that, every word, punctuation mark, and image pixel was subject to change until the final approval was given.

How did I propose an Adobe InCopy workflow could benefit the team? While mainly advertised as a tool for copywriters, its actual super power allowed designers and copywriters to work in parallel, reducing bottlenecks and improving overall efficiency. Copywriters would create their documents similar to a Word document. Designers would create layouts with Adobe InDesign, and import the InCopy documents into the design - from little snippets to entire pages of text, and they would be permanently linked. Add to that, comments and annotations could be added directly within the InCopy documents, allowing for seamless communication. We otherwise had to spend time loading Adobe (InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.) files into a different program that only understood PDFs (in which that conversion process itself could introduce errors) and had a separate annotation system, meaning copywriters and designers had to keep two programs open. This ensured that both teams were always moving forward without waiting on each other for handoffs and long, winding approval processes. They could each see near real-time changes reflected in the design. If adjustments needed to be made, they could be implemented immediately without waiting for the other team to finish their work or opening the files in a separate program. With that knowledge and a clear plan, I started a series of training workshops to get the pilot team up to speed, answer any questions, and game out typical scenarios and edge cases.

So, what actually happened? The pilot project showed seriously promising results. Enthusiasm was there, with excitement among even non-pilot participants growing as word spread we were on to something. Time spent reviewing, editing, and approving content dropped to 1/3. Then, unfortunately for everybody, the music stopped. About a month into the pilot project, the agency went through a major restructuring. Many people, myself included, were let go. Myself as the primary champion of this initiative, along with other participants who were in on it, were shown the door. It effectively died immediately. With the sudden shock reverberating through the agency and less people doing more work, it became a matter of survival just trying to get projects out the door on time rather than investing the time to make things easier in the long-term.

Even though the initiative met an early demise, now at least, there are even better non-Adobe tools available for managing workflows. The 800-pound gorilla in that space is Figma (though Adobe was rightfully blocked trying to buy them, as they tend to buy and snuff out the competition), with PenPot filling in the self-hosted gap. As a matter of fact, my sources that remained on the inside have confirmed that when the agency did finally adopt Figma years later, it significantly improved their workflow efficiency. Sometimes your efforts to improve processes may not come to fruition immediately, but they can lay the groundwork for future success.

Promius Promise Mobile App

2016-2018

To support the newly-released acne drug Zenatane (a generic Accutane) for Promius Pharma, I lead the development of a revised Android/iOS app called Promius Promise. With coordination between myself, our accounts team, the client, and a development contractor, we sought to create a usable tool that could be relied upon by patients on a daily basis. It was a highly upgraded concept to the previous version of the app which at the time was nothing more than an FAQ.

My first task was to take in general client requirements and think out of the box to devise an app from the ground up to support both physicians and patients. I then made the case to stakeholders to provide information to patients about treatment requirements and dosage reminders, have support staff available to answer questions about the drug, and assisting to deliver orders of Zenatane to patients within 24 hours. Additionally, the Promius Promise provided payment assistance for patients both with and without insurance. For this project, I would be the primary technical contact between the client and developer, managing features, priorities, and risk.

The app was wildly successful, going from mere hundreds for the previous iteration to tens of thousands of installs. With the implementation of analytics, we were able to see that patients were using the app regularly, exceeding interaction goals. We further used the analytics to see exactly how it was being used to manage their treatment so we could make continual improvements. The app was so successful that it was briefly a top-50 healthcare-related iOS app, despite its niche market.

Internal Documentation

2015-2018

Immediately upon starting with the company, I realized that there was no documentation for the web developer role, nor any code management (seriously - random folders with no naming convention sitting on a single MacBook. The entire company's digital work!). I then started on a documentation system to exist within our intranet which could be shared with the rest of the company. This took the form of a collection of Microsoft Word documents or a wiki depending on context, and ensuring Markdown readme files for every repository in our new self-hosted GitLab instance.

Ransomware Presentation

Smart Cities International Symposium, 2020

At the 4th Annual (2020) Smart Cities International Symposium, I gave a presentation titled "Ransomware: Strategies of Prevention & Mitigation" to a multi-disciplinary group of people from government and the private sector. It was geared toward non-technical stakeholders to help them understand the risks of ransomware and how to prevent it. The presentation was well-received, and I was able to answer questions from the audience about specific scenarios they were facing. I also provided a list of resources for further reading and research.

Boards, Directors, Non-profits, Oh My!

The Philanthropic page does a good job of explaining my volunteer work. However, in this context I still wanted to make a few points...

Southern Shore Music Festival

For now, check out the Southern Shore Music Festival section on the philanthropic page.

TBD

For now, check out the Philanthropic page to see other relevant work.