The Vision and Guidance of a Great Leader

After a couple of years managing IT for Guaranty National Bank, I joined Capital City Bank (CCB)  where I could be part of a team and I absolutely loved it. It allowed me to focus on key aspects of administration without being a ‘jack of all trades’. The Network Department had network administrators, PC technicians, the Help Desk and a telephone system admin. We were a great team! I got to expand my training into routers, switches, backup systems, SANs, VMs and more.

There are typically two types of work in network administration: support and projects.

Support can be maintenance tasks (adding/removing users, folders, resources) or it can be troubleshooting issues. Sometimes, solving a good puzzle can be fun.

Projects are planned activities like upgrades, implementations, process improvements, hardware replacements, etc.

One of my earliest Facebook posts was - "I safely removed a Dell PowerVault 112T dual LTO-3 racked tape drive and its associated SCSI card from a server today."  No one wanted to know that… only two people in my feed even understood what that meant! 😊 But, I loved that stuff.

I supported Windows server software, Microsoft Active Directory (the login to your computer) & Exchange (email), server hardware, LAN/WAN connectivity, enterprise backup systems and several banking applications. This included supporting users, folders, and other server resources (printers, scanners). Although I wasn’t trained on SQL server (and databases require special handling) I kept getting assigned to fix SQL. I could write queries in SQL but troubleshooting it was my kryptonite. Also, laptop hardware is my other weakness. I break laptops. Server hardware is not as delicate.

My first merger experience was with CCB and while my involvement was hardware related, I talked to many of my banking colleagues to learn more about what was happening. It was fascinating to me that the customers, accounts and “everything” got changed over in one weekend. I remember thinking that must’ve taken an incredible amount of planning and preparation. We were onsite at the acquired bank for several days taking great care to make it a successful event. It was an exciting time.

During my tenure as a network admin, I’d seen a lot of change. I loved working for the bank and most aspects of the job, but there were a couple of pain-points that became greater than my desire to continue in network support.

I’m incredibly grateful that Randy Lashua had a better plan for the direction of my career. 

Randy Lashua is Executive Vice President, Chief Retail Officer of Capital City Bank Group. Back in 2012, he was the Senior Vice President of the IT Department. I managed the Microsoft program for him directly for several years, which gave him insight into my strengths and challenges. He created a position for me to manage projects full time, reporting directly to him.

I was the bank’s first Program & Project Manager.

I will always be thankful for his vision and guidance that helped me find the way to this new career path. Immediately, I began to manage the core banking platform upgrades for CCB and client banks. There were two major initiatives ahead that would require focused (project) attention to ensure success.

The first strategic initiative was to find a way to align Windows network security and processes with the best practice directives set by the Corporate Security & Risk Officer, LeAnne Bailey McCorvey, who is now the bank’s Senior Vice President, Chief Information Security Officer. Up to that point, she was told it couldn’t be done.

I knew it could be done technically, but it would require an enormous amount of time and I could not contradict my manager. With the freedom and authority provided by the change in the organizational reporting structure, I designed a plan to make it happen.

For context, this impacted every employee, and their access to all IT servers, folders and documents. As I was already a network administrator with the security credentials to make all the necessary changes myself, no additional resources were required.

I aligned with LeAnne & Randy’s direction and executed all the changes. I worked with the sponsors, stakeholders and end-users to keep everyone informed, provided support and completed cleanup at the end.

After about 9 months, I completed what was said to be impossible. I’m very proud to say there were no issues and no outages!