Days start early for Ron Kozsan, Director of Infrastructure Services, only a handful of students and staff stumbling around, coffee in hand. But even if the rest of the campus resembles a ghost town before 8:00am, Ron’s mornings are far from quiet. Often, his first task of the day is crisis control, managing various emergencies that occurred overnight. This morning, he was troubleshooting an unexpectedly high phone bill for someone who had been traveling abroad.
By 9:00am, a string of meetings begins: 1-1s with his direct reports, collaborations with the other Systems Directors, and campus-wide committees. These meetings form the bulk of the Director of Infrastructure role, which Ron describes as “managing people who manage people.”
Ron first started at UVic in 2004. After a number of roles, including a stint as Network Services Manager, he earned a promotion to Director of Infrastructure Services in 2010. Over his career, he has served in a variety of roles in a variety of organizations—the government, private sector companies, health care, and higher education. His earlier roles included desktop support, app and database development, and telecommunications support.
Ron credits his work developing the Emergency Notification Service (ENS) in 2008 with teaching him important management skills. When Ron was approached to manage the project, he was initially hesitant. But after his boss suggested it would be a great learning opportunity, Ron agreed to tackle the project. The major challenge was pulling together a diverse group of people with differing skills, varied working styles, and unique needs. But the project, now known as UVic Emergency Alerts, was a success, and Ron emerged with a better understanding of how to manage people with differing backgrounds and perspectives.
As a Director, Ron no longer manages projects, but supports those who do. Coming up next is the Skype for Business project, managed by Chandra Beaveridge. The project “has the potential to consolidate a lot of our communications tools,” according to Ron. But even though the project is in its infancy, there is already excitement and demand from early-adopters, making expectation management the biggest challenge of this project. That’s one of the skills required by a director—knowing how to drum up interest in a new project without making promises that might fall through.
Working in Infrastructure is like working behind the scenes at the theatre; there isn’t much recognition from the crowd when things go right, but there is an uproar when things fail. Fortunately, the managers and staff in Network Services and Data Centre Services—the two divisions of Infrastructure Services—are exceptionally good at preventing disaster.
On his days off, Ron relishes the beautiful West Coast wilderness. He jokes that as a computer science student at UVic, he got “mixed up with the wrong crowd,” a group of avid cavers. Though Ron had never been caving before, he came to enjoy it so much that by 1987, he was the president of the UVic Caving Club. After 15 years, Ron hung up his headlamp for good, but he still spends his weekends hiking with his wife or mountain biking with his friends.
The activities of his workday are not as hands-on as they were in his earlier roles, but he still gets the satisfaction of seeing his colleagues “fired up” about the work they do. And seeing teams work well together? “That’s bliss.”