Employee Spotlight

Andy Harris

Local Support Manager

Andy Harris Manages ‘the Eyes and Ears of IT in the Field’

Of all the 11 regions served by the GSA Infrastructure Global Operations (GITGO) contract, Andy Harris feels that Region 9 is “the coolest.” That’s an arguable assertion, but Region 9 is based in San Francisco and includes sunny Hawaii and locations in Guam, South Korea, and Japan, in addition to such states as Nevada and Arizona.

As the Local Support Manager at the Catapult office in downtown San Francisco, Andy is the point of contact for all GITGO support west of the Mississippi. He manages a staff of 13 people who provide support for infrastructure services, including desktop, network, and server support. “My team is the eyes and ears of IT in the field,” he says.
In addition to managing his staff, Andy manages the workload, making sure that the help desk ticket volume is handled properly. He also manages employee relations and customer issues, and ensures that Catapult remains compliant with Service Level Agreements (SLAs) according to the GITGO contract.

His staff works with their GSA counterparts on infrastructure improvements such as upgrading phone systems, improving operations in Asia, and offering technical guidance or program management. While Andy manages eight people local to San Francisco, the balance are spread out at locations in San Diego, Los Angeles, Honolulu, and in Yokosuka, which is about 60 miles southeast of Tokyo. After the recent earthquake in Japan, Andy lost contact with the subcontractors there, but heard back from them in a matter of days. “There’s been a lot of damage to Japan’s infrastructure,” he says, “and that has affected the GSA sites.”

A lot of the work we do in Region 9 is basic hands-on work with customers, Andy explains. Even though some staff members are remote, “we still function as a team,” he says. In order to meet the challenge of functioning as a single unit, the team is in constant contact through instant messaging and weekly conference calls with his other Catapult and GSA stakeholders, including Andy’s manager Eric Lauderbaugh, who is based in Washington, DC.

Andy was hired by Catapult in 2008 as a support manager. “Catapult has really grown since I came here,” he says. “I’ve noticed that, with regard to Human Resources especially, things run much more smoothly now. The Intranet portal site has been great, because it gives us the ability to access resources whenever we want. That makes us feel more a part of Catapult.”

Andy lives in San Francisco, where he is actively involved in the city’s thriving Gay Softball League. He likes biking, hiking, and the outdoors. His cabin in Sonoma, outside of San Francisco, provides a welcome getaway to wine country.