Meet Richard Armstrong: A People-First IT Professional

Above all else, Richard’s priority is his clients; he aims to ease the day-to-day working lives of Ridgetown faculty, staff and students. In addition to encouraging folks to use their ticketing system, Richard believes in an open-door policy and wants clients to know he is approachable and here to help.

“My primary focus throughout my career has been client service. I always want to know what I can do to help our users perform their jobs more easily and effectively. I’ve come to understand that people will learn to live with things instead of asking for help. That’s why I make it a priority to talk to people and ask what we can do to make things better.” – Richard Armstrong

…and he really means it! On a slow day (which admittedly is quite rare these days!), Richard will often walk around campus asking staff what problems they are having and how he and his team might be able to help.

Richard believes that IT is a team effort and that their successes are shared. He admires his colleagues and knows that their strengths complement one another. When they solve problems together, they always achieve a better solution.  

Ann can’t say enough about how valuable Richard is to the team and to Ridgetown campus. “Richard is constantly thinking about the institution and puts Ridgetown first in everything he does. When change comes, he doesn’t think about how the changes will impact him personally, he thinks about Ridgetown and what’s best for the campus community and his own team. I think that’s why he’s so adaptable to change and models the way for others.”

Ann is also impressed by Richard’s strengths. Among many others, she highlighted how dependable he is, commenting on how he stepped up during a recent server issue (see below) and how he has helped them fill the big skill gap left by Joseph when he resigned. He also demonstrates great personal leadership by consistently building his skills and looking for feedback about how he can improve. He has excellent communication skills, regularly checking in with Ann to let her know what he’s focusing on and what direction he is taking on various projects. Finally, Ann appreciates how much of an IT generalist Richard is, with such a broad range of skills in all areas of IT. This is important to support all areas of IT at Ridgetown.

As IT professionals know, technology evolves at lightning speed. For Richard, he is candid about the fact that keeping up can be a struggle, especially as he gets older. He jokes that he knows he’s becoming an old IT hat when his children have to show him how to do things! Despite it all, he works hard at keeping up to speed, learning new skills all the time. He remains passionate about technology, both old and new. Richard also freely shares that he can suffer from anxiety. He believes a contributing factor is the fact that he tends to take on too much at one time, which can lead to feeling overwhelmed. It can come with the territory of really wanting to help people. Richard is grateful to have a caring manager in Ann, who works with him to develop strategies to prioritize his workload and help manage the stress.

Often one’s strengths are highlighted when the pressure is on. Richard has always felt one of his key strengths is in learning new things. This was certainly put to the test when Ridgetown experienced a significant web server failure just after Joseph left and at a critical point at the start of the fall semester.

The stakes of this service outage were high: the web servers had been hosting sites that impacted both the University and business community users, including sites for government contracts and certification courses important for industry partners.

The solution was for the team to migrate multiple websites to a new server, something that needed to be done as quickly as possible but also something they had never done before. They quickly assembled a highly collaborative team which included folks from Ridgetown and various CCS teams, including Information Security, Network Infrastructure, Systems Management and Web Solutions. Through the hard work of this skilled team, they were able to resolve the situation, with Richard learning how to install the applications for the first time and being the key liaison between CCS and all stakeholders. With help from CCS, they have also been able to implement best practices for securely and sustainably hosting web servers going forward.

“We couldn’t have gotten through this incident without Richard, he was critical to our recovery. He really stepped up and went above and beyond in so many ways. There is nothing better than a team member who shines during a difficult situation, and Richard did just that." – Ann Cesar

Richard has six children, two of whom currently work within CCS! His daughter Aleshia works on the Digital Accessibility Resource Team, part of Web & Development Solutions, and his daughter Victoria is a U of G student working with the CCS IT Help Centre.