OREANDA-NEWS. June 29, 2015. The Operations Controls Open Systems team consisting of Chris Capaldi and John Vartanoff is a 2014 Diversity and Inclusion winner in the Promoting Work-life Flexibility category.  This nomination was submitted by a team of 11 Operations Control Open Systems and Software Configuration Management Team Ford employees.  Each team member has directly experienced a deep level of compassion and a high degree of professional guidance by these two outstanding supervisors.

The Open Systems team is one very busy group.  The team, which is led by Capaldi and Vartanoff, performs a wide array of 24-seven, 365-days-a-year job functions including console management, event correlation analysis, operational incident resolution, job scheduling, reporting, project management, website analysis and metrics, and release deployment.  Additionally, the team monitors automated alerts for CPU utilization, memory, disk space and server availability for over 300 Ford applications. 

Over the last few years, the Operations Control Open Systems team has enrolled over 290 applications into the Operations Control Support Model from multiple ITMS shift left releases.  They provide a visual dashboard of site scope data and simulate business transactions as synthetic monitoring solutions, and maintain knowledge of all applications (Knowledge Articles) within the BMC tool. 

The team also supplies monitoring services for some of the largest financial applications (i.e., FST and ASR) at Ford Motor Company and delivers true global support for over 3,000 daily and weekend application jobs.  They interface weekly with Business IT to provide status and short-term and long-range application updates, launches, code deployment and migrations. 

This dynamic duo and their team has accomplished a great deal while supporting work-life flexibility for their employees.  Capaldi and Vartanoff have demonstrated exemplary leadership skills and have consistently given their direct reports abundant opportunities to exhibit leadership skills while running and protecting the business.  

They consistently delivered results while developing a cohesive, healthy, productive team that works together and strives towards mutual goals.  The team felt Capaldi and Vartanoff deliver results in all phases of the One Ford Expected Behaviors but really exceled at one in particular: supporting work-life flexibility. 

Through Capaldi and Vartanoff’s support of work-life flexibility opportunities, the team has managed to meet and exceed the expectations of supporting Business and IT partners (One Ford Behavior Deliver Results).  They were able to foster supervisor-team collaboration around flexibility in the workplace and find solutions that work for all.  

“To be quite honest, it is a little embarrassing to be recognized for merely doing your job.  However, it is quite gratifying to know that what we do is appreciated by the team, and, most importantly, receiving this recognition at the corporate level provides us validation that what we are doing is appropriate,” said Vartanoff. 

“The important thing is to get the job done, not where you do it or whether you adhere to a strict shift plan.  We all have responsibilities outside of work, be it children, parents, pets or appointments.  When you don’t have to worry about whether your boss is going to give you time to take care of an important personal matter, then you are less distracted and are able to better focus on your objectives at work.  Promoting work-life balance as a company serves as a differentiator and helps us to attract and retain talent,” Capaldi added.