Greater Chicago Area
As a DevOps Consulting Manager with over 20 years of experience in the IT industry, Richard has a strong focus on improving processes through automation, specifically within the areas of DevOps and the observability of software and infrastructure. He has worked with a range of companies, from startups to Fortune 500 firms, and has a deep understanding of DevOps processes and tools such as Azure DevOps, GitHub Enterprise, Terraform Cloud, Netlify, Bitbucket, Jira, and Octopus Deploy. In addition to his professional work, Richard is driven by his passion for learning, helping others through education on best practices and technologies, and making a positive impact. He volunteers with Junior Chamber International (JCI) and frequently speaks at and attends user groups in the Chicago area, discussing topics such as observability, cloud migration, and DevOps transformation.
As Practice Leader for DevOps & Automation at 3Cloud, I own the strategy, execution, and growth of a national consulting practice delivering cloud, platform engineering, and DevOps solutions to enterprise clients across multiple industries. I lead and scale a US-based team of engineers and architects, with full accountability for practice operations, staffing strategy, workforce readiness, delivery quality, and financial performance. I oversee hiring, capacity planning, and client assignments to ensure the practice remains adaptable to shifting market and customer demands. Over the past year, I led a significant organizational transformation by designing and operationalizing a sustainable talent pipeline, strengthening hiring partnerships, improving onboarding and readiness, and restructuring the practice to align skills with business priorities. In parallel, I serve as a partner to Sales and Delivery leadership, supporting multi-million-dollar pursuits, shaping solution strategy, and ensuring execution excellence from presales through delivery. I regularly engage with client executives as a trusted advisor, driving outcomes that extend engagements and deepen long-term partnerships. I own and grow strategic alliances with GitHub, HashiCorp, and Microsoft, including leadership of two Microsoft Advanced Specializations. Through these partnerships, I’ve expanded service offerings, accelerated go-to-market alignment, and increased referral-driven pipeline. My leadership focus is on building high-performing, empowered teams, developing future leaders, and creating repeatable, scalable operating models that balance innovation with delivery rigor. I lead by example—remaining hands-on when needed—while deliberately shifting responsibility to enable scale. My goal is to create a durable impact: for clients, for the business, and for the people who do the work.
As a manager, I oversee a couple of teams of consultants who support our clients in their transition to Azure through their DevOps journey. Additionally, I also head up our internal DevSecOps & SRE Community Of Practice sharing the principles of DevOps and SRE within our organization.
Helping clients migrate and expand on the Azure cloud through leadership in a thought leader capacity; advising clients on best practices for architecting mature CI/CD YAML coded pipelines in the Azure (ADO) cloud platform. Along assisting clients with the monitoring and observation of their cloud application and infrastructure.
The Illinois Jaycee Charitable Foundation is an affiliate organization of the Illinois Junior Chamber, was founded in 1980 by several past leaders of the Illinois Jaycee organization.
Launched and built GoGoRichie.com, my persona, a multifaceted digital brand encompassing a blog, YouTube channel, and active social media presence. I create original content focused on Azure, GitHub, tech conferences, and other hobbies, engage with a growing audience across platforms, and manage all aspects of content strategy, branding, and community development. This role has allowed me to sharpen my skills in digital marketing, SEO, video production, and audience engagement over two decades of consistent content creation.
Volunteering to keep the group moving forward.
· Primarily responsible to advocate for External Developers on the usability of Coyote’s APIs and other integration resources. Created a continuous integration (CI) pipeline between Azure DevOps and the Coyote Github repo to assist with developing, maintain documentation of modifications for APIs and externally consumed libraries. · Advise Sr. Leadership & Product Owners on changes to their products advocated by the external development community. Along the same lines promote the benefits of DevOps by identifying and quantifying the business benefits that come from the greater agility DevOps delivers. · First day responsibility for onboarding new Developers, Automations, and Data Science staff. Created an automated process to reduce onboarding time using ServiceNow, Azure DevOps, Microsoft Power Automate and other O365 products. · Conduct Site Reliability development and Observability Engineering using New Relic, Azure Functions, Elasticsearch, Metric Beats, Heart Beats, Kabana, and Grafana. · Organize and conduct knowledge sharing for IT employees local and remote twice a month. This was done in two formats one geared toward technical and the other was beginner level knowledge. With a heavily remote workforce, I used Microsoft Stream and OBS to broadcast to all our users as well as record the content. · Train development consumers on best practice use of vendor/3rd party utilities. Hosted Knowledge Sessions for Developers and System Engineers. Bringing Industry experts to conduct the training. · Attend conferences and seminars that pertain to development practices and 3rd party tools, present information to the rest of the dev staff upon return. Attended 34 events across the country in 17 months attracting new talent leads.
In this role, I lead and champion the adaptation of 3rd party software solutions and tools that keep our development teams agile and moving forward. I also work with Vendors and our Senior IT Leadership while providing guidance, instruction on the full SDLC while focused on future technologies. Troubleshoot complex technical issues within a custom-built freight brokering software platform and work with our development teams to resolve the issue. Develop, promote, and share proof of concepts for the consumption of internal and external APIs and libraries. Built out POC's using the Azure platform.
I managed the organizations Salesforce.com environment with over 2500 Users. I worked closely with Sales, Marketing and other business functions in the areas of reporting and responding to user requests on daily basis using our service desk system Managed Engine. Serve as the Evangelist and drive user adoption across the sales organization by leading user training across multiple locations. Design and execute solutions for common challenges such as data mapping, object modeling, page layout design, and workflow rules within the context of the Salesforce platform. Build custom applications on the Salesforce platform using the Apex, HTML, and JAVA. That integrates with our custom-built freight broking software platform using SSIS packages as well as Dell Boomi, Relational Junction ETL Manager, and Mulesoft Anypoint Platform.