FY 2023 Employee Of The Year
John North - Administration
Nomination 1- I am nominating John North for EOQ for bringing the OESO website redesign across the finish line and going live on March 2nd after many months of hard work (12 months, to be exact) behind the scenes with Kompleks, our contracted vendor for the website redesign. OESO was required to update the website to a new version of Drupal software. We took the opportunity to redesign the website to the current Duke branding and color scheme and to make it easier for our customers to find the information that is most frequently sought on our site (based on data we have from the Google Analytics John had set up on the existing site). John spent countless hours on this project, from the time spent benchmarking other institutions' EHS websites to provide inspiration for our new design to the nitty gritty manual migration of our many documents when our contractor could not find a way to migrate them automatically (which John whittled down from I think ~1500 to ~600 in the migration process due to outdated and duplicate files). At times, this work was extremely tedious. At times, the project manager and developer were frustrating to work with, as was evidenced by the many communications back-and-forth on which I was copied. John was always professional and took all of the setbacks in stride. He was even able to laugh about some of the situations that might have made others want to pull their hair out! While there are still some hiccups being worked out despite all of the beta testing prior to the live launch, the overall reception from OESO staff as well as our numerous external customers has been extremely positive thus far. Some have raved about how great the new website is organized and how modern it looks! Thanks to John for his diligence in seeing this project through for the last year. Thank you for a job well done!
Nomination 2- John has worked very hard over the last several months to migrate the OESO website content into new web software. This required fitting several "square pegs into round holes", as the prior web content didn't necessarily fit seamlessly with the new format. John did a huge amount of work to build out the new menus and make our content work as well as possible given the new structure.
The website launched on March 2, and I was planning to teach a class about Chemical Hygiene on March 23. That class leans heavily on our web resources. I (with help from others in Lab Safety) proposed reworking those pages, and sent John mock-ups in Word. He was able to modify the menu and several key pages within about 4 days, even with a few "hiccups" requiring additional modifications. Through this process, I got a glimpse of the frustrations involved in this redesign, and I know John has experienced this many times over. However, he remains positive about the process and has created some "workarounds" (some of which have been quite time-consuming) that make the site work better, in spite of some limitations with the software.
I personally have found the new document search to be very helpful, and am impressed by the adaptability for use on mobile devices. Many thanks to John for his work on getting the website ready to go in early March, and for the modifications he has made and will continue to make.
The website affects how OESO is seen by our customers at Duke and by our peer institutions. I hope those on the committee will recognize John's efforts by selecting him as Employee of the Quarter.