Dwight Scull

About Dwight Scull

As an experienced Senior Release Manager specializing in CI/CD and automation, I leverage advanced tools and methodologies to ensure seamless, efficient software releases and deployments. I am committed to enhancing pipeline speed and reliability through strategic innovations, ensuring your software reaches production faster and with superior quality.IT Enabled Business Transformation: At Aetna Health, I spearheaded the automation of the entire release management lifecycle, integrating SharePoint, ServiceNow, and MS Power Automate to streamline processes, enhance audit trails, and facilitate seamless CI/CD pipelines without human intervention. This initiative supported over 50 applications across four business lines, involving collaboration with over 40 teams to ensure rigorous adherence to internal and external auditing standards. My efforts notably optimized release schedules and improved incident management during outages, directly contributing to the reliable delivery of services to over 12 million health insurance customers. Using Agile Methodologies / SAFe Methodologies I was able to deploy production software using CircleCI / Harness / LaunchDarkly tools while utilizing Microsoft Power Automate to facilitate reducing the process and methods to deploy software from days to under 15 minutes with multiple approvals that were captured in Microsoft SharePoint Lists. All of this allowed us to create DORA Metrics using Power BI to look for bottlenecks in our existing processes.Cross-Functional Team Leadership / Project Management: At Visa, I served as a hybrid IT Engineer / Project Manager for the server decommission project. My leadership in automating 80% of the process reduced decommissioning time from 150 days to just 15 days, achieving an estimated annual savings of $2 million. This involved close collaboration with over 15 teams in over 8 timezones to streamline 23 separate steps through automation, enhancing process efficiency and service quality.Automation and Risk Mitigation: At DaVita, I established robust documentation, workflow processes, and procedures. Integrated ITIL and Lean IT principles, I focused on automating workflows and standardizing the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) to manage over 300 production and QA releases annually. My efforts resulted in a cost reduction of $500k per year, while reducing Severity One Critical Outages by 70% over three years.I am committed to leveraging automation, risk management, and cross-functional collaboration to achieve exemplary service delivery and governance in IT environments.

Experience

1. Senior Release Manager

   Aetna, A Cvs Health Company

   Dec 2017 — Present · Denver, CO, US

   PUBLIC SPEAKING: Presented what I have been able to accomplish to Microsoft\'s Health Care User Group. You can watch it here: & t=195sAUTOMATION: Automated the intake, creation, updates, and closure of Release Management paperwork / audit trail into SharePoint List and ServiceNow Standard APIs.IT ENABLED BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION: Developed MS Power Automate workflows to capture requests with MS Forms, that creates/updates SharePoint Lists. The flow then sent several layers of approval and captured to the minute approval records in SharePoint. The flow then used ServiceNow API to create through full closure of change tickets. Our approval process has gone from days to minutes or hours, allowing us to 3x to 4x the number of releases without increasing headcount. AGILE: Established Agile Release Process for Mobile / Web / Microservices / Data / Content Management Systems to enable CI/CD to QA without human intervention.AUDIT / IT COMPLIANCE: Pioneered Agile Release Processes for the above to go to production with proper approvals to pass internal / external auditing standards.CROSS-FUNCTIONAL TEAM LEADERSHIP: Manages the releases of over 40 different teams spanning 4 lines of business and over 50 applications with a small team of release managers.CHANGE CONTROL: Attending CAB calls for the larger organization to represent our Service Now changes as needed. Partnered with Change Leaders to implement processes that enabled automation to have standard preapproved changes to cut lead times down from 3 days to 2 minutes.RISK MITIGATION: Joining outage calls and institutes rollback or roll forward methodologies depending on the situation to fix production in the fastest way possible.CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT: Found ways to scale releases to production by more than 4x for Aetna Health Application which has over 20 million customers.

Education

• Colorado Christian University

  BA, Biblical Studies

  1996 — 2000

• Spring Arbor University

  MA, Spiritual Formation and Leadership Development

  2006 — 2009

Skills

• Leadership
• Virtualization
• Kanban
• App-V
• System Deployment
• Business Analysis
• Windows 7
• Servers
• Itil
• Release Management
• Sccm
• Project Management
• Operational Planning
• Change Management
• Leadership Development
• Scripting
• Consulting
• User Acceptance Testing
• Infrastructure
• Active Directory
• Windows Server
• Operations Management
• Troubleshooting
• Application Packaging
• Os X
• Customer Service
• Software Documentation
• Root Cause Analysis
• Agile Methodologies
• Management
• Operational Risk Management