FinancialForce.com – 2017 – Current – Role: IT Mac Specialist
My career with FinancialForce began with an innocent plane trip to San Francisco in 2017. I came onboard due to IT Leadership’s need for someone experienced with user support and Apple technology. To say that this was only the starting point would be an understatement. Over the course of the past 6 (almost 7) years, I have the dubious honor of being the longest standing member of the United States part of the team, as I’ve watched the company grow and evolve. When I started out, the company was fielding IT support requests via Salesforce Chatter and Google G-Chat. We were building computers for our new hires by hand, and we were living mostly out of G-Suite. Much has changed since then. During my time with the company, we migrated our Helpdesk to a combination of Zendesk and Slack, Implemented DEP onboarding through Apple Business Manager and VMWare’s Intelligent Hub, and have grown our support offerings by leaps and bounds. Still supporting a majority Mac ecosystem, my day can be split between working in Intelligent Hub, Carbon Black, ZenDesk, Code42 Office 365, Splunk, BetterCloud, Fuze, NewVoiceMedia, Duo, Okta, Lastpass, Sailpoint, Zoom, Chrome, and Slack to name a few. At the same time, I’ve found myself writing documentation (I wrote a rather eloquent piece on in-flight wifi several years back), providing Mac training (intro and advanced), as well as productivity training (intro and advanced) as well as recording videos for our user base to self-train as necessary.
Also during this tenure, there was this pandemic that spread around the world. As everything shutdown, and the world discovered the possibilities of working from home, my team was able to move our company to an entirely remote workforce, in a weekend. During this time we kept up with supply chain issues and other logistical hurdles, while keeping newly hired folks equipped, receiving equipment from folks separating from the company, and managing to provide a very high level of service despite our necessary decentralization.
But, what might you ask, was life like before this? Before the pandemic, I directly supported the company’s office in Portland, OR, being the direct point of contact for IT and for our Facilities team. At the same time, I was the primary on-site support for our Bellevue, WA office, Making the trip between Portland and Seattle as necessary (I still make this trip as needed). Beyond this, I was regularly traveling to San Francisco, and San Jose to support multiple office projects in both cities. Office support could, and did include everything from hunting down WAP’s in ceilings, building ZoomRooms, setting up printers, replacing hardware in server rooms, building furniture, repair the errant refrigerator, to creating custom artwork for offices, and testing access badge systems. During this time, I also helped facilitate 5 different office moves, directly overseeing two of them.
Even further beyond this, post pandemic, rather than allowing my company to E-waste an excess of technology that had accumulated during the pandemic, I helped to facilitate and execute the organization and donation of an extensive amount of hardware to a local non-Profit, providing both a tax write-off for my employer, and significant donation to said non-profit, which allowed them a great resource with which to benefit the local community.
Most currently, my time is spent supporting users, working on the never-ending process of documentation, mentoring younger team members, leading team meetings, compliance audits, processing leaver shutdowns, equipment retrieval, front-line support, working with our devices team to support their multiple projects, and whatever happens to come my way on any given day.