Reference

This is the 2003 performance review written by Pete Cattrell, my direct report supervisor at UC Berkeley ITS-TTP.


Shifra shares routine maintenance and upgrade responsibilities for our tech platform with (two coworkers on the systems team), but her expertise is in coding, and she had lead responsibility for building our customized web-based registration system this year, and will assume lead responsibility in web applications development in the year ahead.

Shifra is a model IT employee; she would be a model employee in the most demanding setting. She is comfortable with both close supervision and with a high degree of autonomy in project development and project management; she has highly developed documentation and specification skills, and yet is proactive about client and user input in every phase of technology development. She commits to the highest level realistic objectives without hesitation and executes with unswerving focus and quality control. Shifra is completely comfortable architecting solutions at both macro and micro levels. She is performance driven, opportunity driven, and very nicely obsessed with highest quality standards, both in her technical work and in her responsibilities for the technology-operations interface. Her skills in this domain are among the best we've ever seen. Her instincts in applications design-build are superb, her work ethic and product development protocols are exemplary, her design-build vision comprehensive, flexible, and inclusive.

As a team member, Shifra is mature beyond belief. Her work is organized, planned, and executed with care, with exceptional attention to detail, and within a comprehensive grasp of the other work relations that will be impacted by her performance. Shifra is received and admired by others as an exceptional human being: as a person who not only manages heavy work responsibilities with excellent organizational spirit and conviviality, but a person as well who thrills to working hard for maximum beneficial effect, and yet someone who, at the same time and at every step along the way, is accessible, upbeat, engaging, and often just plain inspirational. Shifra uplifts everyone who comes into routine contact with her; she therefore makes them better performers, happier workers, and better team members, and the ripple effects of her engaging example multiply throughout the program and its constituencies.

When technology people and organizational people come together to talk about technology solutions to organizational goals and problems, Shifra is the ideal type of solutions manager that everyone would like to bring to the project. Shifra understands organizations, people, and technology applications, and her two signal virtues are her ability to understand the technology delivery context, the real world technology impact context, and the design-build requirements for a sophisticated piece of web applications development and all its architectural ramifications. Her value on the organizational side of applications development is immeasurable.

However, Shifra is like a zen master of coding, and all of her organizational value, and all of her nice person value, pales beside the value of her coding expertise. Shifra is like the lead engineer in construction engineering, someone who will oversee and guarantee the entire process of design-build construction from concept through project management and fiscal reporting to closeout and punch list, on time, on budget, and with project distinction. All of our plans for engaging and serving our customers and clients through our web site depend on Shifra; all of our plans for integrated financial management, for database client relationship management, and for award-winning web applications and utilities depend on Shifra, and she is happily up to the task. It would be hard to imagine a better companion on the design-build path.



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