Rock Star of the Month (August 2016) – Catherine Friot and Paul Kappel

This month’s Rock Star award goes to two esteemed colleagues in the Services Group who truly went above and beyond the call of duty to deliver a critical project for a very important—and longtime—client, a large art museum in New York City. Our two Rock Stars worked 36 straight hours with no sleep to meet an overnight conversion deadline for the client’s final dry run data load and merge. But their efforts didn’t end there. They then put in another set of long hours to successfully complete the final data conversion for the client’s Go Live. And just who are these two super Rock Stars? They are none other than Catherine Friot and Paul Kappel. Congratulations, Catherine and Paul, you are our August 2016 JCA Rock Stars!

Sixteen years ago, I had the pleasure of working directly with Catherine to do this same client’s development and membership conversion from a legacy mainframe-based system (anyone remember the IBM 4381?) called Benefactor to the then cutting-edge client/server Pledgemaker system. This was back in the pre-FIDO days and Catherine did a yeoman’s job to map and program that conversion. Out of more than $1.4 billion in contributions/memberships, she was able to reconcile to within $40 of the expected totals. How ironic that, 16 years later, Catherine was back on the scene to convert the client out of Pledgemaker and bring them forward onto Tessitura. And how fortunate for the client that she was able to help them once again.

But this project was truly a collaborative effort between Catherine and Paul. Paul had been working closely with the client’s Membership and Development teams to map and test the conversion from Pledgemaker to Tessitura. The core team for the project, which included stakeholders from many departments, was quite large and had high expectations. Paul helped them work through numerous complex mapping decisions, and worked with Catherine to implement those decisions. The two of them then worked closely to develop the procedures to transform and load the data. Paul was also responsible for developing the testing plans to help the client validate the conversion. In the course of the project, Paul has helped further develop JCA’s conversion methodology both for testing and handoff.

At JCA, we truly value the long hours and dedication to do the job the right way. Catherine and Paul, you are Rock Stars!