Paul Rice

Leaders raise the performance bar with every hire and promotion. They recognize exceptional talent, and willingly move them throughout the organization. Leaders develop leaders and take seriously their role in coaching others. We work on behalf of our people to invent mechanisms for development like Career Choice.

In Gino Wickman's book Traction (a highly recommended read), he states "Each of your departmental heads should be better than you in his or her respective position. Of course, you will need to give them clear expectations and instill a system for effective communication and accountability. Once you have the right people in the right seats, let them run with it." I am a leader that firmly believes in making sure my organization has the right people in the right seats. Doing this all starts with hiring and developing the best! I've spent many years recruiting, interviewing, hiring, and growing teams, and as a result, have learned how to hire the best!

Leaders are owners. They think long term and don’t sacrifice long-term value for short-term results. They act on behalf of the entire company, beyond just their own team. They never say “that’s not my job."

While working at Universal Plant Services, we went through many trainings that centered around Jocko Willink's Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy Seals Lead and Win. This teaching was invaluable and taught me the importance of empowering your team to lead and absolutely own what they do. A key overlap with the Amazon principle is the idea of never saying "that's not my job". Use good discernment and make good calls to keep projects moving and get results.

Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.

In Harry Beckwith's book Selling The Invisible, (at least read the first chapter!), he discusses the importance of truly understanding the psyche of your customer. Being obsessed about your customer, how they think, what they worry about, what they truly need, is vital in delivering a great product or service. The gist of this book is understanding that ultimately we are selling services (even tangible products package services with them), and it's those services that are "invisible" to the end customer. The customer can't touch, or taste the service to inspect quality, or know exactly what they are getting. This creates what the book calls a worried soul. To obsess over our customers would be to start first by understanding their worry, and work backwards.

Leaders listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully. They are vocally self-critical, even when doing so is awkward or embarrassing. Leaders do not believe their or their team’s body odor smells of perfume. They benchmark themselves and their teams against the best.

I'd take a medium performer with high trust over a top performer with no trust any day of the week. Trust is huge. Be quick to listen, and slow to speak. Treat others with respect and genuine interest and you will develop trust. Deliver on your promises and go out of your way to make sure you are looking out for their best interests and not just your own. Be willing to be transparent and have humility. When people see you can admit your mistakes and work harder to learn from it and fix it, you will develop trust.

Leaders operate at all levels, stay connected to the details, audit frequently, and are skeptical when metrics and anecdote differ. No task is beneath them.

When I worked a Loomis, the President always stressed "Measure. Monitor. Manage." This stuck with me throughout my career, and I am a leader that believes in objective ways to measure performance. It's easy to focus in on anecdotal evidence, whether good or bad, and get wrong reads on exactly where your organization sits. In Gino Wickman's book What The Heck Is EOS?, he goes over tried and true tools for leading and growing a company. One of those tools is developing a scorecard that objectively measures progress and has threshold goals that must be hit weekly. If threshold goals aren't hit, you know what to manage to. There is an art to picking the right metrics, but when you do, it allows me as a leader to not always have to "get in the weeds" or "micro manage", and yet still have a good measure on what's going on and know when I need to "swoop down" and get into the details every now and then.

Leaders focus on the key inputs for their business and deliver them with the right quality and in a timely fashion. Despite setbacks, they rise to the occasion and never settle.

Delivering results with quality is huge. As a Certified Scrum Product Owner, I learned what it means to maximize value of the product. If you want to provide value to your end customer, you must deliver! Sounds simple, but making sure a steady stream of value is delivered is important. In the software world, this is why Agile and Scrum are so useful, as it gets rid of the bloat and makes sure value is being delivered often (as opposed to Waterfall). Quality is also apart of value, for the obvious reason that if you deliver something often, but that thing has poor quality, well what value gained was that? This is why having a good quality department that understands not just how to test, but what to test is vital in delivering results.

This was my bread and butter go to for building out applications when I did fulltime programming. I had built a reusable code base I'd use over and over for various applications that consisted of an amazing bootstrap theme, well architected n-tier design (Presentation, API, Business, Data), Entity Framework utilizing design patterns such as Unit of Work and Repository Pattern, and Microsoft SQL Server. All of this would be hosted in Microsoft Azure or on on-prem servers.

I've worked with Azure and used this platform to host and deploy applications to. Using a platform like this makes managing web applications so much easier. I use Azure DevOps to hook into Azure via Azure Pipelines, using YAML to handle automated CI/CD deployments from Azure DevOps Git Repos.

When it comes to the latest Angular, I've mostly been managing teams, have helped on high-level architecture, and have built out basic applications to stay hands-on and keep my skills sharp. Earlier on in my career I used AngularJS to build out various enterprise applications.

Core came out right when I was moving to more managing teams and growing a business. No longer could I only architect solutions but instead had to start hiring others and managing teams of architects and developers instead. Almost all of the same principles still apply from Web API 2, and have built out Core APIs for pet projects to keep my "hands on" skills sharp.

C# has been the go to language for me for nearly my entire career. Started back in 1.1. I've used extension methods, generics, base classes, interfaces, reflection, dependency injection, entity framework, and more.

I've been working with SQL for nearly my entire career. I've written way too many SQL queries, stored procedures, views, SQL Jobs, and SSIS packages. I have also built out a plethora of well thought out relational databases over my career and now I can't help but think about things relationally right away when talking about building a new application. Primary Keys, Foreign Keys, many-to-many relationships, proper indexing and more!

I have personally used and led many software project endeavors that utilized Azure DevOps to the fullest. Everything from Azure Boards, Azure Pipelines, Azure Repos, and Azure Test Plans.

I had used Jira for many, many years and it is still near and dear to my heart (given all of it's nuances and customizations I had to do to it). I've used this to manage building out many software projects and tracked tasks, time logging, and more. However, these days I prefer Microsoft Azure DevOps as it has truly evolved and is "out of the box" ready to go.

As a web developer over the last 18+ years, I've had my fair share of JavaScript. I had to use it before any fancy front-end JavaScript frameworks existed, and had to deal with all it's craziness. Old school JavaScript folks know exactly what I'm talking about!

I spent time with a couple of interns I brought in at my company teaching them coding by building out a networked pong game using this technology and p5.js. It was fun! Of course node and npm are used to help build out Angular applications I've been apart of.

Clearly any web developer knows their HTML and CSS. I personally took a very keen interest in not just being a developer, but also being somewhat artistic minded when it came to creating applications. I always strived to have very aesthetically pleasing web sites and also user friendly as well. Once bootstrap came along, this made life so much easier!

I am not a designer that created Sass and LESS but instead was a consumer of it and benefited from it being used in bootstrap themes.

I've done my fair share of SSRS reports of the years and has been my main go to. I've helped build a dynamic platform into custom software applications to serve up SSRS reports. I've only briefly dabbled in Tableau and dabbled a little more with Power BI. I know each enough to know what they can do and what skills you'd need to perform the role of a report builder.

I like fun technology, especially game programming, and even more virtual reality! I'm also a firm believer in giving back and training up the next generation of developers! While I was at Ceremity, I led a summer internship with a group of really smart, talented students from Klein Highschool. We decided to build an exercise game using Unity and Virtual Reality! Coming soon I will add a project page that goes over this in detail and get to see a video of the students and what we created!

I am expert level Microsoft Word, Excel, and Power Point. I use OneNote to track meetings notes. Microsoft Teams for communication and project organization. Microsoft Tasks (Planner) for organizing my day. Microsoft Stream to host video content. OneDrive to backup files. Outlook for email. SharePoint for intranet and file sharing. I've picked up quite a few tips and tricks with all of these tools that contribute to helping improve productivity.

Better security equals better quality, reliability, and sustainability. It's important. I worked with Microsoft to help deploy the Microsoft E5 Platform within our organization to help improve security. We implemented Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), as this is seriously the number 1 attack vector these days to compromise companies. We implemented Microsoft Defender for End Point Protection (EPP) to help stop malware and viruses. We implemented End Point Detection and Response (EDR) to help improve items that may be missed by Defender and allow us to follow up and stop even more threats. We implemented Digital Loss Prevention (DLP) to help protect the company's sensitive data from going where it shouldn't.

A Scrum Master is the Scrum Team member tasked with fostering an effective and productive working environment and guiding others to understand Scrum values, principles and practices. Scrum Masters tend to be people-oriented, have a high level of emotional intelligence, and find joy in helping team members to grow. (source)

Product owners have a unique and demanding role on agile teams. A product owner decides what the team will create next in order to deliver more value to the customer. Product Owners juggle multiple stakeholders’ needs, create a product vision, and have ways to get to know their customers so that you can choose the right next piece of value to bring to market for them. (source)

This certification proves my knowledge of cloud concepts, Azure services, Azure workloads, security and privacy in Azure, as well as Azure pricing and support. This include familiarity with general technology concepts, including concepts of networking, storage, compute, application support, and application development. (source)

This certification proves my knowledge of Azure Data concepts, such as relational (SQL) and non-relational data (NOSQL), Azure Data Lakes, data warehouses (Synapse), reporting (Power BI), and more. (source)

ITIL® 4 Foundation demonstrates this individual understands the key concepts of IT and digital service delivery including the key concepts, guiding principles and practices of ITIL® 4 for service management. They have a fundamental understanding of the modern organization's end-to-end operating model for the creation, delivery and continual improvement of technology-enabled products and services. They have an awareness of how cultural or behavioral principles benefits the wider organization. (source)

CompTIA A+ is the industry standard for establishing a career in IT and the preferred qualifying credential for technical support and IT operational roles. It is the only industry-recognized credential with performance-based items to prove pros can think on their feet to perform critical IT support tasks in the moment. It is trusted by employers around the world to identify the go-to person in endpoint management & technical support roles. (source)

CompTIA Network+ covers the configuration, management, and troubleshooting of common wired and wireless network devices. Also focus on specific areas like critical security concepts, key cloud computing best practices and typical service models, newer hardware and virtualization techniques and concepts to give individuals the combination of skills to keep the network resilient. (source)

The CompTIA IT Operations Specialist is a stackable certification achieved by completing both CompTIA A+ and CompTIA Network+.

The Security+ exam certifies that I have the knowledge and skills required to install and configure systems to secure applications, networks, and devices; perform threat analysis and respond with appropriate mitigation techniques; participate in risk mitigation activities; and operate with an awareness of applicable policies, laws, and regulations. (source)

The CompTIA Secure Infrastructure Specialist is a stackable certification achieved by completing CompTIA A+, CompTIA Network+, and CompTIA Security+.