John Ruppel
Verified Expert in Engineering
DevSecOps Leader and Developer
Raleigh, NC, United States
Toptal member since May 5, 2021
John is a globally recognized leader and coach for Agile and DevOps adoptions, digital and business transformations, and building high-performance organizations. He has defined, operationalized, and supported CI/CD pipelines to flow value to customers while generating revenue for leading global organizations and governments (e.g., AWS, Cisco, Philips, Buhler, DoD). John has led and mentored leaders in organizational change, change management, and high visibility, mission-critical initiatives.
Portfolio
Experience
- Agile - 20 years
- Customer Experience - 20 years
- DevOps - 20 years
- Transformational Leadership - 20 years
- Technical Program Management - 20 years
- Business Transformation - 20 years
- Digital Transformation - 20 years
- New Products & Services - 20 years
Preferred Environment
Agile, DevOps, DevSecOps, Lean, Digital Transformation, Business Transformation, Business & Digital Transformation, Transformational Leadership, Agile Transformation
The most amazing...
...thing I've done was author global Agile, DevOps, transformation, and leadership standards to optimize the flow of value to customers while generating revenue.
Work Experience
Transformation Guide & Leader | Change Agent | Program Manager | Director | Senior Leader | Author
Intelligence Catalyst
- Ensured value flow to the customer while generating revenue—the fundamental foundation I use to build, evolve, and mature CI/CD pipelines, software factories, and product-service-platform development ecosystems.
- Translated business and developer speak into a common language, ensuring clear communication and everyone is on the same page. Hearing one another improves decision-making.
- Led, trained, and mentored senior leaders, mid-level leaders, team leaders, stakeholders, and key individual contributors on successfully adopting Agile for a medical device industry leader.
- Spearheaded platform solution development efforts integrating 10+ COTS and proprietary products, processes, and methods into a seamless real-time delivery solution to provide the customers with what they needed, when, and where they needed it.
- Authored a best-selling leadership book: "Transact, Transform, Transcend, Becoming a Thoughtful Leader: Stories from the Journey". Provided workshops, training, mentoring, and coaching to help leaders apply the concepts from the book to real life.
DASA US Ambassador
DASA (DevOps Agile Skills Association)
- Authored Agile, DevOps, transformation, and leadership standards; created and delivered certificate programs and training; applied the standards to customers' real-world operations to achieve results while generating revenue.
- Continued to explore and experiment with other thought leaders in adoption, migration, transformation, and high-performing organizational building to continuously improve ways to better my organization and customers.
- Launched and continued leading a collaboration with DASA leaders in Canada and Latin America to organize a common forum to help organizations learn, understand, and apply the new DASA standards to achieve real-time results.
- Served as the DASA Ambassador for the US. My charter is to bring global Agile and DevOps adoption, as well as digital and business transformation-leading knowledge, tools, and methods to organizations in the US.
Leadership Development | Coach | Mentor | Author
TYIIR Institute, LLC
- Worked with leadership experts and trainers from around the world to research, explore, experiment, document, train, and mentor leaders on how they can be the best leaders and transformation officers.
- Collaborated with wellness experts to research, experiment, document, train, coach, and mentor individuals, their teams, and their organizations on what is and how to incorporate wellness into their culture and mindset for how they think and do.
- Helped individuals, leaders, and managers be open with themselves, as well as learn about themselves and their abilities to be the best versions of themselves.
- Compared the leaders' understanding of themselves to what the business, environment, or organization is demanding of them. Aligned on a plan for how they can grow and provide the required management or leadership for success.
- Authored two books, TYIIR (Transform Your Ideas Into Reality) and KIS (Keep Intuition Simple), to help individuals, teams, and organizations transform their ideas into reality—being the best managers and leaders they can be.
Transformation/Migration Advisor | Environment Manager
Pearson
- Acted as a safety net for multi-vendor efforts to migrate production environments from Oracle to AWS—the largest ERP cloud migration at the time. I was involved in all aspects: planning, move groups, SME discussions, security, architecture, etc.
- Led the migration of a non-production environment from Oracle to AWS with one-third of the resources used in migrating production. It was the largest ERP cloud migration at the time.
- Partnered with DBAs using Delphix technology to migrate petabytes of data.
- Created an online environment management system for both prod and non-prod environments. Visualization of data included usage, cost, and runtime metrics (FinOps) to help business leaders utilize the environments more effectively and efficiently.
Experience
Digital Transformation Leader | Coach | Transformation Guide | Author
My consulting engagements have included all aspects, from ideation through implementation, installation, migration, support, and operationalization. I have used a wide variety of tools and technologies, including legacy, to migrate to various cloud vendors. This includes:
• The largest ERP migration from Oracle Cloud onto AWS.
• The largest digital transformation of a financial institution.
I delivered infrastructures, security frameworks, and data transfers for thousands of applications and servers in various situations. I reduced operating costs, increased agility and flexibility, modernized operations to take advantage of new methods, and improved security.
Digital Services | Global Platform Initiative
This required me to train, develop, and implement an Agile and DevOps culture, mindset, people, data, processes (the flow), and tools. I then went into the field to work with sales teams on sales enablement and how to sell the solution and digital services.
Within a year, the project initiative was successful, internal leaders were promoted, and the project is now a key global initiative, helping this global industry leader maintain their global market leader position.
World Class Service & Platform Development
This included working with leaders to standardize the culture, mindset, data, process (the flow), and tools (technology) across multiple vendor companies so the CI/CD pipelines were standardized. In addition, I was the single point liaison between ASW and Philips CISOs and their teams to standardize and train project members for anyone who worked on the effort.
Divisional Transformations for a Top 5 Global Aerospace Company
Real-time, Real-world, Subject-based Delivery Solutions
I created the strategy and architected, implemented, and made operational this real-time, on-demand solution for organizations in three different industries serving three different audiences. The commonality between the solutions is to flow value to the customer and create revenue, save money, or reduce cycle time. My efforts involved the modernizing of culture, mindset, people, data, process (the flow), and tools.
Sales Process & Sales Enablement | Customer Alignment
The result was evolved sales processes, methods, initiatives, and programs for how my organization sold and enabled sales. One company used my "preflight" process for all Global 500 prospects or those whom the board of directors deemed critical prospects.
This approach and solutions were successful in four different companies, ranging from VC-funded small companies in their second round of funding to the world's leading single sign-on (SSO) solution. It was also used by a company that successfully went public by growing a GIS service to be one of the company's four main pillars for flowing value.
Modernizing Project Management Organizations (PMOs)
COMPANY 1
Supporting a 5-year, $1 billion transformation effort required adopting DevOps and Agile (Kanban, Scrum, and SAFe frameworks), reskilling project managers to be scrum masters and product owners, incorporating rituals, and retooling with Jira, Confluence, and various COTS DevOps industry-leading tools. I was the lead PM working with the testing tool SME and senior executive to architect topology and ontology, define, design, and operationalize a proprietary integrated automated testing process and toolset.
COMPANY 2
Sales teams switched to a just-in-time (JIT) approach. I led the creation and operationalization of the PMO to support JIT prototypes to work in conjunction with sales to close the deal. This included training and mentoring senior leaders with hands-on resources, leading by example, working directly with sales teams, and demonstrating how to succeed.
Education
MBA in Business Administration
University of Phoenix - Phoenix, AZ, USA
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science
National University - San Diego, CA, USA
Certifications
DASA DevOps Leader + TTT (Train The Trainer)
DevOps Skills Association (DASA)
DASA DevOps Coach + TTT (Train The Trainer)
DevOps Skills Association (DASA)
DASA DevOps Fundamentals
DevOps Skills Association (DASA)
Project Management Professional (PMP)
Project Management Institute (PMI)
Skills
Tools
Miro, Jira, Atlassian Suite, Atlassian, BMC Remedy, Oracle ERP
Paradigms
DevOps, Agile, Management, DevSecOps, Testing, Change Management, Virtual Instructor-led Training (VILT), Instructional Design, App Development, Requirements Analysis, Automation, Agile Project Management, Scrum, Kanban
Industry Expertise
Project Management, Lean Six Sigma
Languages
C++, HTML
Frameworks
AWS HA
Platforms
Oracle
Storage
Database Migration, Cloud Environments
Other
Transformational Leadership, Business Process Improvement (BPI), Leadership, Requirements, Customer Experience, Program Management, Technical Program Management, New Products, New Products & Services, Digital Transformation, Business Transformation, Service Development, Business Administration, Software Development, Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), Development, Quality Assurance (QA), Operational Readiness, Auditing, Business Development, Product Development, Implementation, Governance, AWS DevOps, Web Services, Lean, Data, Innovation, Organizational Leadership, Organizational Behavior (OB), Organizational Development, CI/CD Pipelines, Certifications, Certified Trainer, Training, Train the Trainer (TTT), Instructor-led Training (ILT), Instruction & Coaching, Technical Instruction, Classroom-based Instruction, Wellness, Holistic Wellness, Product Management, Projects, IT Projects, Team Leadership, Remote Team Leadership, Agile Leadership, Business Processes, Business Process Analysis, Business Process Modeling, Business Process Automation, Business Process Re-engineering, Business Process Management (BPM), Business Process Optimization, Business Process Flow (BPF), Value Stream Mapping, Business to Business (B2B), Product Leadership, Change Leadership, Thought Leadership, Servant Leadership, Project Leadership, Technical Leadership, Leadership Development, Cross-functional Team Leadership, Pipelines, Software, PMO Development, SOP Development, Organizational Design, Organizational Strategy, Organizational Structure, Organizational Communication, Organizational Change Management (OCM), Customer Service Strategy, Remote Support, Remote Desktop, App Design, Internet of Things (IoT), User Requirements, Business Requirements, System Requirements, Technical Requirements, Functional Requirements, Requirements & Specifications, Compliance, Analytics, Digital Services, Agile Transformation, Business & Digital Transformation, Business Transformation Program Management, Agile DevOps, IT Automation, IT Management, Goal Management, IT Support, App Support, Peer Support, Knowledge Transfer, Knowledge Sharing, Knowledge Management, Jira Administrator, Jira Administration, Oracle ERP Cloud, Virtual Environments, Cloud FinOps, Sales, Tech Sales, Sales Enablement, Sales & Channel Enablement, Partnerships, Global Partner Channel, Use Cases, Use Case Analysis, Agile Sprints, Agile QA, IT Project Management, Global Project Management, Project Review, Project Design, Program Design, Global Product Management, Large-scale Projects, International Projects, Cross-border Projects, Project Scoping, Project Closure, Project Bidding, Project Support, Digital Project Management, Project Design & Management, Software Project Management, Scrum Coaching, Scrum Master, Sales Process Management, Sales Pipelines
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