I consulted with Mr. Gregson directly in his role as primary Migration Architect & Consultant for a multi-national Auto Parts Manufacturer.
His success is evidenced by the fact that the client wants him back to do more work again and again. He was a great person to work with on a team, often dealing with challenges of an international migration in a professional manner.
The project required working directly with IT Technicians and End Users across on every continent in various back office, manufacturing, distribution and executive roles. In addition, Rick maintained trusted relationships with the Sr Technical and IT Executive teams.
He is someone I would recommend to anyone looking for a strong, consultative IT professional who excels in dealing with challenges that are inherent to complex migration scenarios.
Rick is a true professional and a very technical resource. Rick worked with me at Eliassen Group to one of our clients that needed someone who was a great communicator and facilitator.
Rick was able to walk them through the steps necessary for a large scale Active Directory Consolidation. He jumped in head first to assist them and was patient and very flexible to get the project done at a pace that was acceptable to them.
Not only is he a great resource for any client, he is also a great guy to speak and work with from an agency standpoint. I highly recommend Rick.
I have had the opportunity to work closely with Rick over the course of the past two years related to a large migration project for an international medical device manufacture.
During this time period Rick demonstrated himself to be a true IT consultant and trusted business advisor.
Rick has all the technical abilities required to perform complex domain and system migration projects but is equally skilled in project management, communication and ensuring customer satisfaction.
Rick has been on my project team for a year now, and it has been an absolute pleasure working with him. Considering we worked together almost every day, including most Saturday nights, I considered him one of my closest colleagues, even though he technically was our consultant. I sometimes thought he cared more about the outcome of the project than we did, with his always looking for possible dependency risks and alternative ways of approaching the challenges we encountered.
With a scope of some 400 old servers, with old applications, and sometimes without any clear ownership, that were to be migrated from the multiple legacy domains to the new global singular domain, the largest part of the work was actually discovery and planning. In spite of being an outsider, Rick quickly learned the Smith & Nephew way, and picked up on details on owners and stakeholders, dependencies and history of applications, and the technical architecture of the Smith & Nephew infrastructure.
Rick’s duties were to execute the actual domain migrations, but he quickly became a valuable support in assisting in the much needed discovery process, which actually often resulted in the discovery that a server could be decommissioned rather than migrated. With Rick’s help, we successfully migrated almost 200 servers off our legacy domains, and decommissioned more than 200 servers, greatly reducing and simplifying Smith & Nephew’s complex domain footprint, and providing in great cost savings on maintenance of servers.
Finally, his positive persona made even the longest most challenging Saturday nights a pleasure. I truly hope I get the opportunity to work with him again.
As lead Architect and Migration Engineer, Rick has been instrumental to the success of our company and client. His professionalism, attention to detail, communication and organizational skills are top notch and unparalleled.
Through his efforts, our client was able to achieve immediate ROI benefits on their migration project, and was their first project of this size that has been completed on time and under budget.
Scope of Project:
- Four legacy resource domains
- One large domain integrated through recent acquisition activity
- Over 550 servers in scope of migration
- Over 1,100 workstations in scope of migration
Some of the specific accomplishments of Rick on this project were:
- Performing the Console HealthCheck and addressing exposed issues of concern
- Analyzing the AD Domains and bridging the gap for missed/onboarded Users
- Provided Technical Leadership and Expert Guidance from the Dell (Quest) Migration Manager toolset’s point-of-view
- Performing Server Rationalization for hosts in the Legacy Domains
- Performed over 350 Server migrations (Single-host as well as Application environments) with less than 1% experiencing any issue
- Thru Server Rationalization, identified Approx 200 Servers for Decomm allowing client to realize a cost-savings from their Managed Services provider
