o Letter of Recommendation Question 2: Please provide example(s) that illustrate why you believe this candidate will find success throughout their career. (Word count: 300)

• Letter of Recommendation Question 2: Please provide example(s) that illustrate why you believe this candidate will find success throughout their career. (Word count: 300)

 

[Writing Tips: This question expects the recommender to go beyond merely confirming or documenting the applicant’s past and present job performance. Rather, Wharton wants to see whether the recommender understands the applicant’s current post-MBA goals or has a vision for the career direction that the applicant can or should pursue. In essence, this question elevates the perspective of a recommender from that of merely a knowledgeable endorser to that of a fully-informed mentor and champion. So, Wharton MBA applicants, what are you going to do about this new challenge?]

 

[Note to the writer: Please write a 300 words Letter of recommendation based on the provided examples.]

Some Elements that will help Kyle to success in his career:

• Diligence

Kyle comes to office everyday 5am to study for the GMAT test. This shows that Kyle can push himself to achieve his goal.

• Reliability

Kyle is a reliable and trustful resource who has proven record of complete his project/assignment within a timeline with quality.

Ex) GRC initiatives and Security Severity 1 vulnerability management

• Leadership

Kyle motivates and inspires people to deliver the organization’s goals

Ex) Symantec certification replacement and Centralized Intake Process

• Career Goals

Kyle has a clear short term and long term career goals. Please see in below detail.

 

Kyle’s Career Goals

Kyle likes his current role and expect to grow his career within this organization in near term; to be a  senior technical leader in Cisco WebEx Cloud Service team, specifically in the domains of technology innovation and process improvement.

Kyle’s long-term career goal is to be an entrepreneur who can make people’s lives better through innovative Cloud, Mobile, and Collaboration technologies where Kyle has a domain knowledge and professional work experiences.

 

Kyle’s Major work accomplishments at Cisco

1. Centralized Intake Process

C.I is a collaborative process that all project requests are submitted, evaluated and delivered via a standardized approach that takes into account urgency and complexity while aligning to business and strategic priorities.

 

Situation:

There was no strategic decision making and filtering process for new project requests; ‘Yes to all’ new project request.

 

Action:

-Met all key stakeholders to listen to their pain points and wish-lists
-Developed the fundamental principles of the Centralized intake process and reviewed with key stakeholders
-Socialized the new centralized intake process to all stakeholders

Result:

-C.I process deployed from 2016, Q3

-No more stealth projects, all initiated projects are reviewed and approved by the leadership team, and strategic alignment and business value is assured
-The number of projects is reduced, accomplished clear project prioritization and efficient resource allocation
-Improved morale and productivity

 

 

2. Symantec certification replacement

Situation: In early 2017, Google announced to distrust Symantec certification from Chrome web browser. To abide by Google’s new security policy, we had to replace all Symantec certification with Cisco issued new certification by December 1, 2017.

 

 

Action:
-Done thorough product/service/customer impact analysis with multiple stakeholders
-Tested on ATS/BTS environment first to capture any unforeseen issues
-Replaced the certification at least busy and low customer impact Prod. environment first

 

Challenge: It was a large complex project that more than 100 Cisco employees participated and customer communication reached out to more than 145,oooWebEx customers. We anticipated that certification replacement itself was a simple and straightforward effort however we could hardly conduct impact and risk analysis because nobody knows the end to end certification architect and deployment status. Below is some technical challenge examples that we encountered during the project:

Challenge example #1: CMR 3 Cert authentication failed because of certification authorization mismatch
Reason to fail: We found CMR 3 server has an own server certification so when we replaced LB certification only, certification authorization mismatch happened between LB and CMR 3

Servers.
Actions to fix: Replaced LB and CMR 3 certification at a time and to avoid the same kind of problem again, we identified all WebEx components that use SSL communication, and the certification is residing on other than LB. (We found total 22 WebEx components have own certification.)

 

Challenge example #2: BTS SSL offloading was sharing Prod. LB that prevents BTS testing

Actions to fix: We identified all Prod./BTS SSL traffic and diverted BTS SSL offloading to a new BTS LB and successfully replaced certification on BTS sites only; Certification replacement testing on BTS environment was possible.

 

Result:

After 10 months of hard working, we successfully replaced all SSL certification on WebEx environment without any service incidents. I got connected.recognition from Sharon and below is her message:

“Kyle, Thank you for your hard work in driving the Symantec Certification Replacement. Since the inception, you have provided very clear updates to the cross-functional team. You’ve ensured risks were managed, and this resulted in a very successful change execution this past week. Great Job!” November 9, 2017.