Meet Melissa Schultz, one of our Client Engagement Managers, located in Colorado!

What is your favorite thing about Logicworks?
I worked at a lot of other companies, and Logicworks is the first place where I have ever felt at home. When things don’t make sense, we openly discuss and make changes. My problems are not considered small by my superiors and often get resolved for me. I really love that.

Additionally, my favorite thing about Logicworks is our CEO, Ken Ziegler. Ever since we began working from home due to Covid19, he sends weekly update emails where all department managers highlight their teams. Being in Denver, we’re a few weeks behind New York in regards to the virus, so whenever there’s an update I know to go buy some toilet paper to prepare!

Outside of that, he has not shied away from saying anything regarding Black Lives Matter. I have talked to my superiors about potential landmine topics, and they respect me and my concerns. I feel I can talk to them about anything.

What is your role?
As a Client Engagement Manager, my responsibility is to onboard customers onto our managed services and navigate any technical, operational, or political pitfalls that may arise. I’m responsible for building customer relationships, managing first impressions and getting them excited about our managed services and their long-term relationship with us.

I also manage the team that turns a statement of work into reality. I partner with a Solutions Architect to discuss with the client their business needs and technical drivers which we use to produce a custom designed environment. We map out the work, aligning it to best practices and Logicworks security standards, and transfer the information from the Solutions Architect to the Build Engineer.

Once we build out the environment, the customer will load their application onto the infrastructure layer. The customer is then responsible for the application layer and testing it through to full functionality. Once the application is there, we apply Logicworks’ suite of managed services including monitoring and alerting processes, Trend Micro security packages, ThreatStack security event management, and any other needed processes to secure the customer’s specific needs. Following this process is vital to maintaining the customer relationship while plugging and playing resources and changing subject matters over months of work.

What’s a typical day like for you?
The first thing I do every day is spend 30 minutes organizing my day and building a task list for myself and my projects. As I get new items throughout the day, I will throw them on the list. At the end of the day, I go back and flesh out what still needs to be done and tie up loose ends.

In between time management, I have meetings. I’m the primary contact for my assigned clients, so I’m often having calls to discuss their needs. I’ll also have general project management meetings where we’re looking at timelines, talking about contracts and technical working sessions that are led by an engineer. I rarely have less than 5 hours of client meetings a day.

What is the most exciting part about your job?
Everything we do here is highly technical. From our customers’ perspective, this may be the most anxiety-driven business operation they had to do in years. It’s a great opportunity to help people get through it smoothly and easily.

There are a lot of wins to be had, and I enjoy getting those wins. My favorite part of my job is onboarding our customers and calming their anxieties. That’s a win. Or finding and discovering a solution to a technical problem that was causing things to get muddied. That’s also a win.

Did you ever think you would be in the technology industry growing up? How did you get into the Cloud industry?

When I was in college, I minored in music. I was a singer and a dancer, and I played five instruments. To this day, I still have a ballet bar in my workout room. I was also an off-broadway performer and was in the national tours of Chicago, Victor Victoria, and the Disney Musical Revue (which was my favorite to perform).

I went into the IT industry because I had to make a conscious decision about the direction of my life and performing wasn’t panning out in terms of money and stability. So, I decided to go to business school. I picked IT because there wasn’t enough female representation, and I wanted to go into a male dominated industry.

What are you currently watching on Netflix/Hulu/Prime?

I just finished watching a few documentaries. I also like a lot of weird horror movies and have been digging the bottom of the barrel on Netflix. I love anything dumb, bloody, or scary. If it’s won an academy award, I don’t want to see it.

Where is your favorite travel destination and why?

I have two favorite spots. Mexico is my favorite place. The beaches are perfect, the people are nice, and it’s a short 6-hour flight. I have the best group of friends. We pick up and run to Cancun for a weekend a few times a year, and it’s the best.

My second favorite travel destination is Teton Valley, Idaho. It is on the other side of the Tetons from Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Teton Valley is considered America’s greatest unspoiled wilderness and has the largest elk preserve with over 45,000 elk that you can view on a sleigh ride during the winter.

What are you passionate about outside of work?

I love hiking in Colorado. We have “fourteeners” which are the 58 peaks in theRocky Mountains that are all over 14 thousand feet tall. If you hike to the top of a fourteener, you have bragging rights.

I have personally hiked four fourteeners and failed two, which take about 12 hours to complete.

Other than hiking, I love yoga, dancing, and singing. I spend time volunteering at the Happy Trails Horse Rescue whenever I can to work with horses and pigs because I love animals. I’m also passionate about civil rights and that has taken up a lot of my time lately.

Advice for anyone looking to join the cloud computing industry?

Start doing it! There are so many reasons to get into the cloud. If you want to, there’s no reason to not start now. All you have to do is say yes. You don’t need to work for AWS to create an account and launch a VPC with an instance inside it and a load balancer in front of it. And the Cloud Practitioner courses are free to take.

I got into the cloud industry because it’s exciting, constantly changing, and allows me to work with cutting edge technology.

This interview is part of a series of interviews with Logicworks employees. If you’re interested in applying to Logicworks, visit our Jobs page or email us at jcowle@logicworks.net.