The context

TRAILS was growing fast — from a small regional initiative into a national mental health platform serving over 12,000 schools and 30,000+ professionals. With that growth came a problem that quietly compounded every week: the organization had no formal system for managing the devices its employees used.

Devices were tracked inconsistently, if at all. When someone joined, IT provisioning was improvised. When someone left, device recovery was informal — creating real data security exposure. As a remote-first, distributed workforce, the stakes of getting this wrong were higher than they would be in a traditional office environment.

What we were working with

When I assessed the landscape, the gaps broke down into five distinct problem areas:

• No reliable asset tracking — device ownership was informal and inventory records were fragmented across spreadsheets and memory
• Inconsistent onboarding — new employee device setup varied by who handled it, leading to configuration gaps and security inconsistencies
• Weak offboarding controls — no defined process for data wiping, device recovery, or access revocation at separation
• Manual provisioning — setup took hours per device with no standardized tooling, causing delays and errors
• No visibility into lifecycle status — leadership had no reliable picture of device age, condition, or reissuance readiness

Individually, each gap was manageable. Together, they represented a meaningful operational and security risk for an organization scaling nationally with sensitive student mental health data in scope.

Key decisions and tradeoffs

This wasn't a case of applying a standard playbook. TRAILS was an early-stage non-profit with lean resources, a distributed workforce, and no existing IT infrastructure to build on. Every design decision had to balance security rigor against operational simplicity.

How it came together

Outcomes and impact

The program launched on schedule and delivered measurable improvements across every dimension we tracked.

Beyond the numbers, this program eliminated a category of security risk that was genuinely concerning for an organization handling sensitive student mental health data. It also gave leadership reliable visibility into the device fleet for the first time — which directly informed budgeting and procurement planning going forward.

The context

USADA's in-house testing application, DCO Mobile, was purpose-built for domestic doping control operations — and it worked well within those boundaries. But as anti-doping operations became increasingly international, the platform's limitations became a real operational liability. DCO Mobile wasn't designed for direct data exchange with ADAMS, the centralized anti-doping management system governed by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), meaning every cross-border coordination required manual reconciliation to bridge the gap.

MODOC — a globally adopted testing platform used by anti-doping organizations worldwide — offered a path to standardization. Making the switch meant gaining native ADAMS integration and alignment with international agency workflows, but it also meant migrating mission-critical operations for a program where disruption to live athlete testing wasn't just an inconvenience — it was a compliance risk with real consequences for athletes and governing bodies.

What we were working with

The core challenge wasn't just replacing software — it was replacing software that sat at the center of a tightly coupled ecosystem of internal systems, external agencies, and field operations.

• No native ADAMS integration in DCO Mobile — every cross-border data exchange required manual effort to reformat and reconcile testing records
• Misalignment with international agency workflows — other anti-doping organizations operated in MODOC, creating friction in joint testing programs
• Complex internal dependencies — MODOC needed to integrate with SIMON, PostgreSQL, and SFTP pipelines without disrupting existing workflows
• Distributed field operations — DCOs worked across geographically dispersed locations, making a simultaneous cutover operationally dangerous
• Decommissioning risk — retiring DCO Mobile meant ensuring no historical data was lost and no active testing workflows were left mid-cycle

Key decisions and tradeoffs

How it came together

Outcomes and impact

The migration completed on schedule across all regions with no disruption to live athlete testing operations.

The context

TRAILS had grown from a regional pilot into a national mental health program serving thousands of schools across the country. That growth had exposed a structural problem with how the organization managed its operational data. Program delivery, training operations, and stakeholder engagement each ran through their own tools and processes, with Airtable serving as the closest thing to a shared system of record. In practice, data lived in disconnected places, reporting was unreliable, and leadership was making expansion decisions without a clear view of what was happening on the ground.

What we were working with

• Disconnected systems — program data, training records, and stakeholder information lived in separate tools with no reliable linkage
• Limited reporting visibility — leadership had no reliable way to understand program delivery status or training outcomes at a national level
• Manual process overhead — routine operations required significant manual coordination across tools, slowing teams down
• No scalable access controls — the absence of structured data governance created real security and compliance exposure as the organization grew

Key decisions and tradeoffs

How it came together

Outcomes and impact

For the first time, TRAILS' executive team had reliable, real-time reporting on program delivery, training completion, and stakeholder engagement at a national scale — directly informing expansion decisions in a way that fragmented Airtable data never could.

The context

USADA's athlete compliance operations ran on a legacy platform that had aged out of step with the demands placed on it. Whereabouts reporting — the process by which athletes in the Registered Testing Pool must file their daily location availability for no-advance-notice testing — requires precision and consistency. A system that's hard to use produces errors. Errors produce compliance risk. And in anti-doping, compliance risk has real consequences for athletes.

Athlete Connect was USADA's answer: a modern, purpose-built web application designed around how athletes actually work. My role was to lead the delivery of that platform across engineering, QA, and compliance teams — from requirements definition through production launch.

What we were working with

• Low adoption driven by poor usability — athletes avoided or minimized their use of the platform, increasing the likelihood of missed filings and compliance gaps
• High error rates in Whereabouts reporting — a system that made errors easy was a systemic compliance risk under WADA rules
• Limited operational visibility — staff had insufficient real-time insight into athlete compliance status for proactive outreach
• Fragmented data — athlete testing records, drug reference data, and compliance history lived in separate systems with no unified view

Key decisions and tradeoffs

How it came together

Outcomes and impact

Athlete Connect established a centralized, integrated compliance platform that gave USADA teams real-time visibility into athlete status for the first time — shifting from reactive case management to proactive outreach, which is a fundamentally more effective operating model.

The context

When a Doping Control Officer conducts an athlete test in the field, every step — from notification to sample collection to chain-of-custody documentation — must be recorded with precision. The data generated is legally significant: it forms the evidentiary basis for anti-doping rule violation proceedings and must be defensible under international arbitration standards.

For years, USADA managed this process on paper. Officers completed forms by hand, scanned them, emailed them to headquarters, and then staff re-entered the data into internal systems. As testing operations scaled, this workflow became an operational liability — delays accumulated, transcription errors introduced data integrity risk, and the paper trail was slower and harder to audit than a digital record.

What we were working with

• Manual data entry at two points — in the field on paper, then again at headquarters during transcription — doubled the opportunity for error
• Transmission delays — physical forms moved through scan-email-entry workflows that added hours between field collection and lab receipt
• Limited traceability — reconstructing chain of custody for a given sample required piecing together paper records, scanned documents, and email threads
• No pre-arrival data to labs — laboratories received samples before having any advance data, increasing processing time

Key decisions and tradeoffs

How it came together

Outcomes and impact

The context

The Air Force Satellite Control Network (AFSCN) is the global ground-based infrastructure that commands and controls U.S. military satellites. It operates across geographically distributed sites, with each location dependent on communications infrastructure, command and control systems, and IT support that must be available continuously — but especially during launch windows, when new satellites are being brought into operational status.

Launch events are operationally compressed and unforgiving. The sequence of events runs on a precise timeline. Any gap in IT infrastructure, communications availability, or systems support during that window doesn't produce a minor inconvenience; it produces a mission impact. My role was to ensure that never happened.

What we were working with

• Zero tolerance for downtime — any failure in command and control systems or communications during a launch window had direct mission consequences
• Geographically distributed dependencies — multiple sites across different time zones had to be confirmed ready before a launch could proceed
• Compressed resolution windows — issues that could be addressed over hours in normal operations had to be resolved in minutes during a live event
• High consequence of escalation gaps — unclear escalation paths could delay issue resolution past the point where recovery was possible
• Limited rehearsal opportunity — launches happen on fixed schedules determined by orbital mechanics, not IT readiness

Key decisions and tradeoffs

How it came together

Outcomes and impact

The operational processes developed through these launch events — structured pre-launch validation, explicit escalation paths, and disciplined post-event review — became repeatable standards that improved consistency across subsequent events. The broader IT operations program was recognized as a Best Practice by the Air Force Space Command Inspector General.