Teamwork

Throughout my career I worked with a number of teams, each usually associated with a different software product. The first team that I worked with was the COMMS team. COMMS was an acronym for Community Online Materials Management System. It was the first online system that had been developed by our organization and was already under development when I started. My first manager was Steve Boehk who is also still working for Ascension Health. After Steve moved from Project Leader to Technical Services, a new implementation team was formed. What I learned from that initial development team proved invaluable in my future career. So hats off to Steve for being such a great manager and teacher.

After the software team completed programming and testing we moved into implementation in the Daughters of Charity hospitals that were part of the Northeast and Southeast Provinces. This new implementation team consisted of Howard Allen, myself, Mary Ann Corkran, now a CIO at Johns Hopkins University (I still keep in touch with Mary Ann), and Kathy Egner. We spent several years implementing the system in thirteen hospitals. We got to know each other so well and traveled together so often and dined together so much that people began to assume we were two married couples. At one point in time it had been determined that I had spent more of Mary Ann’s wedding anniversaries with her than her husband Rich. When I was talking to Mary Ann the other day, she started to relay a story to me that I immediately recalled. We were in Binghamton, New York at the Holiday Inn Arena downtown. It had been a very long day and we had stopped at the hotel lounge. I never really was much of a drinker but I suppose that evening I may have had one too many. We must have gone through multiple bowls of Tostitos which both Mary Ann and I specifically recalled and at one time I looked up and Howard, Mary Ann and Kathy were staring at me in horror. Apparently I had been laughing and had thrown my head back, hit it on the corner of a brick wall, and didn’t feel a thing. We all called it an evening after that.

In another memorable situation it turned out that one of the original development programmers had a bit more of a sense of humor than any of us knew. Before Rosie left the organization she had been working on a particular function that required a high level of difficulty to complete appropriately. Before she left I asked her assurances that this was completed. Rosie assured me that it was. A week later I was looking at the code and noticed that she had inserted a comment that said, “And then a miracle occurs.” She had in fact not completed the code. I was left with the responsibility of creating that miracle in Assembler Level Macro Code where our largest program had to be 16K or under. Yes, that does say K. But Rosie wasn’t done yet. We got a phone call one day from one of our users complaining about an error message that had come up on the screen. We said, “What message are you talking about?” and she said, “The turkey message.” We said, “The turkey message?” Normally when you want to relay an error to a user you use the politest language possible. Rosie had decided that this particular error would be so egregious that the message said, “You can’t do that, you turkey.” We had to remove that message immediately but it lives on in infamy.

My next team was my Baltimore MedSeries4 team. This consisted of Dave Galloway, George Walker, Bill Manwarring, and myself. By this time I was managing two teams, the COMMS team and the MedSeries4 team. The four of us were installing MedSeries4 in the same facilities where we had previously installed COMMS. In Pottsville, Pennsylvania we went to the same diner every morning. The server would see us pull up and within minutes of walking in the door our orders were already on the table because we had the same thing for breakfast every day. We often fell into the trap in the evenings of saying, “Oh we’ll get out in time for dinner. Let’s not go to the cafeteria.” Of course we never did and we’d end up eating out of the snack machines – usually cheese crackers. After a while for some reason we started referring to the cheese crackers as turkey sandwiches. But not everyone caught on. One evening Dave said, “I’m about to go get some turkey sandwiches, anybody want any?” And Bill pipes up, “You know I don’t get it. You say that every night and you always come back with cheese crackers.” Bills energy level would wane quickly as the week wore on. Both of these teams would work so hard and learn so much in those times that I know they have all progressed to excellent careers.

Perhaps the largest and most diverse team that I have worked with is the team that grew from two people in 1990 to nine people by the time I transitioned to supply Chain in 2007. This was the MedSeries4 team for the East Central Province, later combined with the OmniBuyer implementation team.

Back row: Jan Clark, Barry, Jim Hook, Linda Clemmer, Cindy Hawes
Front row: Maddie Vecchi, Cathy Riley, Scott Culiver

COMMS had been installed in the Daughters of Charity East Central province also but was going to be replaced by MedSeries4 as it had been in the Northeast and Southeast. Jim Hook and I began that process in 1990. At the time I was living in Baltimore, Jim was in Evansville, Indiana and we would travel to the various sites to do the implementations. As our support base grew, Maddie Vecchi joined us in 1994. Maddie lived in Salt Lake City. Over the years we added Jan Clark now in Bend, Oregon, and Cathy Riley from Salt Lake. Maddie, Jan and Cathy were all from the MedSeries4 organization so they were a perfect fit for our team. In 2001 Ascension Health Supply Chain reviewed their data requirements for products and contract analysis and embarked on a project to put an Internet-based requisitioning/workflow system as an overlay in all Ascension Health facilities. The product was OmniBuyer and our team became the implementation team for the product across the country. We added Scott Culiver, Linda Clemmer, and Cindy Hawes all in Evansville. All three of these individuals transitioned from other positions in ISD to join the team. A few years ago Tarun Gulati, now in Chicago, also joined our team. Unfortunately Tarun is not in the team picture that is featured at the top of this section.

Please note, all four time zones of the United States are represented on this team. I believe there may still be team members that have not met in person. Of all the teams I have worked with, my proudest professional moments have been with this incredible group of people. Juggling twenty-four hour on-call for multiple systems for nearly every Ascension facility across the country, handling support issues for well over ten thousand users, developing new processes and procedures, this team never failed to step up to a challenge and continues to do so to this day.

Shortly after we were transitioned from Ascension Health ISD to CSC, I did not feel fulfilled in my role as a CSC manager. I went to my manager Sondra Schoenbaum and asked if there was some sort of solution we could determine. Scott had significant previous management experience. We were able to affect a trade in jobs. Scott became my manager and took over the management of this outstanding team of people.

I do have many amusing stories about this team but I will list those separately because there are too many and God knows this has gone on long enough. I realize that this is a very long entry but nothing of value is completed in a vacuum. I wanted to acknowledge and thank all of those team members over the years that I have worked with and that have had such a significant impact on my career. I pray I have had an impact on theirs.