Jeni Anderson runs our Network Operations Center, which is the team you reach when something is wrong and you need it to be right. Five years at Koltiv, three in this seat. If you knew her as Jeni Griffin, she just got married (congrats, Jeni!)
Ask her to sum up the job, and she skips the org chart completely. "I feel like I'm just here to serve other people."
A few things about Jeni. Her house is a gaming house. Husband, a seven-year-old, a cat, and a standing Fortnite date with her son. Hand her a game she has never played, and she will have it figured out before you do, which she says is the one thing she is weirdly good at that has nothing to do with work.
She is a night owl who can be up at two or three on a weekend without really trying. She is on a serious pumpkin cream shaken espresso streak right now, with a Red Bull on the mornings when there was no time to stop. She reads constantly; she is working through a Harry Potter crochet kit, and she's watched The Office so many times she's had to give it a rest.
She also never planned on any of this. Jeni wanted to be a nurse like her grandma, got through one year of nursing prerequisites, and realized it was not for her. She joined the National Guard, picked up IT as a second specialty almost incidentally, and that turned out to be the thing.
What she is proudest of here. Jeni started at Koltiv as a NOC coordinator, dispatching tickets and working the phones. When the manager seat opened up, she asked for it outright. She had done a version of the job before, so why not give her a try.
She will not take the credit for what came next. "The kudos is not to me." The way she tells it, she made it happen, and her team is the reason it worked, because they decided the NOC was going to be their future and pulled in the same direction.
Ask about that team, and she gets going. Chris works overnight; he is on her team and in the United States, so a midnight call reaches a live person, not an answering service. If Chris cannot solve it, he wakes up an on-call engineer, because that is the job.
She is firm about one rule in particular. Her techs do not quietly fix something in your environment and never mention it. If they see something, they say something, even when it is small, like catching a license set not to renew. It is your business, so you should know what we touched.
Her favorite recent story is about them, not her. One of our newer clients was still in the overlap month of their transition when six new hires started at once, and the equipment showed up late. Her team built the machines, created the accounts, and shipped all six the same day the hardware landed. Everybody was working the next morning.
One last thing. We asked what she would want you to remember her for, if it could only be one thing. She did not pick a project or a migration. She picked the call that comes in frustrated, from somebody who hasn't been heard yet and needs to say it out loud before anything gets fixed. That is the call she wants.
Which is worth knowing, because people constantly apologize to her team. Sorry to call. Sorry to bug you. Sorry for another email.
"That's quite literally why we're here."