User:Jskelley714

John Kelley

November 16th, 1960 to ? John Kelley slept through most of his life. He occasionally awoke in time to avert major catastrophes; paying bills, moving, changing jobs, and finding partners who endured years of mood swings and travel related anxiety.

He started out in the real world having graduated from Waltham Senior High, Waltham, MA. He immediately moved to Des Moines, Iowa. Six months later he awoke to the sounds of hailstones larger than baseballs. He quickly returned to Waltham.

John hopped his way through the 80's and 90's while living in Henniker, NH.: Sanders Associates, Prime Computer, Banyan Systems (relocated to San Francisco, CA, Lotus Development, Bank of America, to name a few. With Prime Computer, he traveled through Europe. Lotus sent him to every major city in the US. Then he woke up again, he landed in an unknown airport terminal and wondered what customer he was visiting. He sat there for nearly and hour. It turned out that he landed at home in San Francisco at a terminal other than United. He quit two weeks later. At Bank of America, he worked his way up to Vice President, Senior Systems Engineer. As Y2K approached, all system changes were frozen, the prospect of nine months of doing nothing while the dot com revolution was happening outside his window. So, he jumped into the dot com pool.

After the dot com bust, he found a job in Orange County where he is resting comfortably awaiting for the next wake up call. During his time as Systems Manager for Groupware at Ameriquest, John was asked to deploy a UAT for Microsoft Exchange [5] and Outlook client [6] to a small group of users. The UAT expanded to include Blackberry Enterprise Server [7], RightFax [8] and a wildly unpopular connector between Microsoft Exchange and [[1]]. The original UAT group expanded beyond 300 people due to politics. The result of the effort demonstrated TCO over perceived value. While the users were happy with Outlook, the cost to convert 25K users went beyond "open checkbook" of Ameriquest's heydays. A presentation to the CIO demonstrated of three new email alternatives. One of which was "do nothing" with a minimal yearly licensing agreement. Additionally, the existing Lotus Domino and Notes [9] infrastructure maintained instantaneous failover to a local or remote DR node.

Having worn out his welcome as Systems Manager for Email and RightFax [10], John was asked to lead a team of Peregrine Systems [11] developers. The Peregrine implementation was highly customized and suffered from an inability to upgrade as a result of the modifications. To make matters worse, Ameriquest was broken into smaller companies. Each new company wanted their data to be separated and managed on their own implementation. There were two other major issues, frequency of incongruous changes to the system that resulted failures and a "Clocks Table" design that prevented KPI reports from running. To address the frequency of changes, John established a two-tier deployment strategy, a monthly peer review of all up coming changes, each change would be scrutinized for conflicts, all approved changes would be announced and implemented. A second release date was established no less than 15 days later for bug fixes. The "Clocks Table" continued to plague the enduser community, the only was to gauge KPI and SLA reports, the system needed to be shut down to access the information. The team was divided by knowledge level and pay grade. John asked the senior developers to establish a level of stewardship by mentoring the whole team. Incorporating change schedules and implementing a stewardship environment improved a bad situation. John was invited to see a demonstration of Service-now.com. He then presented a cost savings solution to the growing Peregrine Systems problem. The CIO was nonplussed at the time, but eventually saw a service improvement and the possibility significant staff reductions. While participating in a bizarre team building exercise, John exacerbated a neck injury during series of outdoor team activities that required the lifting of each team member between two bungee cords attached to two trees. John left the field and went straight to the doctor and received a 30 day leave of absence. A couple of days later on, May 2, 2006, Ameriquest rolled over and played dead. They didn't die, but 4,800 people got laid off. While John was on a leave of absence, Ameriquest broke several laws by laying him off. This rude awakening means looking for work again. Something no one should have to endure. On May 25th, 2006, John endured an Anterior Cervical Discectomy [12]. John was hired on at Service-now.com on 8/7/2006. He's maintained a position of Engagement Manager for four years He maintains a happy and health relationship with new and previous customers.

He recently started university for the first time. What's an Associates degree at 46 or a BS at 49? How about student loans until age 70? He is fondly remembered by: