What Sets Me Apart?

Relationship Building

I love working side by side with my dog in our hybrid environment, but it also makes relationships with coworkers more challenging and more important than ever. Getting to know people, understanding their perspectives, and what is important to them is one of my best strengths. Afterall, we are all working toward the same goal.

Dealing with Ambiguity

This might be my best strength. Is the guidance unclear, vague, and contradictory? Maybe even impossible? I am the person for the job. I love diving into these scenarios, determining the core requirements, and communicating clear guidance as a result. This is also why I quickly become a go-to person on processes and software.

Problem Solving

This comes after figuring out the ambiguity. Once you know what is needed, you often are faced with the "how". This might be working through a technical issue with subject matter experts, resolving personel issues, or conflicts between teams with different goals. No matter what the problem is I am always happy to dive in to help with the solution.

"Don't be content to merely survive. You must Demand to
live in a better world not just dream about it."

Where am I Going?

When I look back through my experience I see a lot of aircrafts. I have enjoyed my time in the aerospace industry, but the products I support are not products that everyday people, like myself, can use. Human Factors is one of my favorite parts of engineering and software design. Evaluating various designs for how intuitive they are for human interaction is hard to do if you rarely or never use the end product. This is why I want to move into a career managing projects I can interact with from the customer side. Human factors is a skill that we can use not only to design products and software, but should be used to manage in our industries. Even something as simple as an Excel spreadsheet can benefit from an elegant design that is intuitive. I consider human factors regularly in my style of managing people, programs, and projects. Having well thought out tools and organization reduces redundancy and increases consistency. I am pursuing more opportunities to do this in my career and also further my education in Human Computer Interactions and Material Design.

Career Highlights

Engineering Project Coordination

Coordinated engineering activities to get efficient FAA certifications for new aircraft designs. I identified needs and developed tools to prioritize tasks with complex relationships. Ownership of these tools were handed off to the software team where they were made more robust and are still in use today. The tools I developed were one of the ways I found to better manage and coordinate activities on a large team.

Product Support Specialist

What doesn't a Product Support Specialist do? Maybe the most fun job of my career. Anywhere from finding ways to automate aircraft spec sheets and manage product improvements with outside vendors, to pulling out all of the stops to make sure deliveries happen on time. While we had a small team with low company priority, the work was just as important as higher priority tasks. This forced me to be more creative with the resources we had.

Deputy Program Manager

After spending 7 years in aviation, I joined the manufacturing branch of Virgin Galactic, The Spaceship Company. I was part of a small team that established the Customer Support organization. We were tasked with creating an organization from a blank slate to something of value. As products transfered ownership from one business to the other there was no shortage of obstacles to address. We built relationships between the companies and set them up for success with the tools they needed to do regular maintenance. This was uncharted territory for both companies.

Senior Project Manager to Technical Manager

In 2019 I joined the Kansas City National Security Campus managed by Honeywell. I received a Q level security clearance and managed multiple projects supporting the test equipment needs for many of the products we made. These projects are managed using Earned Value Management methodology and I learned textbook project management as a result. I worked on a team of over 20 technical project managers until I was given the opportunity to manage the team. My team manages over 400 different projects and act as the liasons between the Program Management Office and Engineering. We also manage the scope, schedule, and cost for each project.