Kaitlyn Richardson

• Responsible for the supervision and technical direction of Avista's electrical Distribution Operations group, including 11 Distribution Operators and 4 Operations Engineers.
• Responsible for overseeing and coordinating the 24-hour Distribution Operations Center for the safe and reliable operation of Avista’s electric distribution system.
• Ensures a high level of customer service and satisfaction by supervising the efficient dispatching of crews and serviceman during normal, trouble, outage, and emergency conditions.
• Responsible for coordination between Distribution Operations, Transmission Operations, Electric Operations, and area offices.
• Responsible for developing, updating, and implementing Avista’s Emergency Operations Plan (EOP) for the electric distribution system.
• Responsible for Avista’s Distribution Reliability Program.
• Responsible to keep Avista management and Corporate Communications informed of emergency conditions and outage updates.
• Serve on various Steering Committees across the department for Projects, providing guidance and leadership on scope, schedule, and budget - also to include technical direction and strategy including representing the area of system reliability and supportability.

• Experience with Union contract negotiations and upholding contract obligations.
• Member of "Connections" Employee Resource Group (ERG) - our mission is to provide employees with a networking forum for growth and professional development.

• Lead a team of 21 IT operations and automation engineers responsible for performing the operate, optimize, capacity plan, and maintain duties for our communications, network, endpoint, compute/storage, and automation for all IT infrastructure for a 155.2 million dollar revenue company.
• Created processes to reduce unplanned downtime and increase system reliability and efficiency of systems using automated technology.
• Created processes to engage with business partners on visibility and mutual agreement on planning changes/upgrades - leading to improved trust and relationships.
• Responsible for a $2 million dollar annual operating budget and $1 million dollar capital budget - responsibilities include managing budget to forecast goals, contract management with vendors, and regular collaboration with Senior and Executive Leadership.
• Lead various initiatives within the company, including owning a $6.25 million dollar Infrastructure Automation productivity initiative, gaining visibility and support from Executives.
• Serve on various Steering Committees across the department for Projects, providing guidance and leadership on scope, schedule, and budget - also to include technical direction and strategy including representing the area of system reliability and supportability.
• Maintain operating procedures and process, maintenance schedules, Disaster Recovery planning and exercises, improving and actioning on security best practices, and employee training and development.
• Participated in complex labor relations meetings related to Union matters - duties now include successfully implementing new working rules
• Helping lead and implement a Corporate wide formal internship program.
• Member of "Connections" Employee Resource Group (ERG) - our mission is to provide employees with a networking forum for growth and professional development.

• Administer and maintain Lync environment, Teams, AudioCodes SBCs and IP phones, Vantage IM Auditor, Evault Discovery Accelerator, Polycom Trios, Verint Call Recorders, Avaya call center technologies, RightFax, and Exchange.
• Assist with the rollout of Microsoft Teams and the Live Events platform.
• Assess technical infrastructure for areas in need of improvement and develop solutions.
• Implement various optimizations to our Skype, MS Teams, and AudioCodes design to improve the quality of the platform and resolve various chronic issues.
• Helped lead a Townhall initiative to help enable our employees to work from home and better train them on the usage of our various collaboration tools.
• Helped implement our new collaborative support model for ET, training our new Comm. Ops Technician role on various duties.
• Work with vendors, managed service providers, and third-party companies to implement and support technologies.
• Follow company policies and procedures with changes in our Production environment.
• Train and mentor current and new employees.
• Create technical documentation for administrators and end users.
• Presenter for the 2020 ET Year in Review.
• Increasing customer service skills through email, IM, screen shares, phone calls, and in-person contact.
• Participates in an on-call rotation.