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Unsung Heroes: Dominic Rizzo

August 1st, 2022

In a company of 120+ people spread across the country, there are A LOT of moving parts. Whether it's behind the scenes in the various admin departments, out in the field at project sites, or out of the country on an audit, its impossible to be aware of every single thing happening in any given week.

The problem? HRPers do amazing things each and every week and everyone needs to know about it. The solution? Introducing the Unsung Heroes of HRP.

This new blog series is dedicated to showcasing HRP's number one asset, our people! Each post will spotlight an employee and their expertise not only at HRP, but also outside of work in order to give you a better understanding of who we are. Our next unsung hero is Dominic Rizzo out of our HRP headquarters in Farmington, CT!

To learn a little more about Dominic, his career, and his life outside of work, we sat down and asked him some questions:

 

Q: How long have you been here?

A: I will have worked for HRP for 5 years this August.

Q: What do you do at HRP?

A: I am an IT Associate, it is a generalized role since there is only me and Dave. I have to do cybersecurity, system administration, network administration, asset and patch management, computer hardware repairs, and general help desk.

Q: What was your first role at HRP and how has that changed?

A: I started at HRP as a Project Geologist in our Fairfield County Office working on CTDOT projects, Dave Pramanik caught wind that I worked on computers outside of work as a hobby and asked if I would be interested in working in IT fulltime.

Q: What excites you about your role at HRP?

A: I get really excited whenever I see malware or phishing emails come through I really enjoy getting to do some forensic work on them and see how they work. The samples are very interesting because they have to do a lot of development into obfuscation (a fancy word for hiding) so it doesn’t get picked up by anti-malware software. Diving into malware really helps me learn new tricks in programing in different languages as well as learning tricks that malicious actors use to hide themselves from being caught.

Q: What’s your best HRP memory?

A: That is a hard question to answer, rather than pointing to one specific situation I think it would be better to call them all out. Since starting here five years ago I have had a variety of issues where I have had to go back to Houston to help my family. Never once have I felt that I had to worry about whether or not my job was on the line if I couldn’t work when I had to go back. The first of these times was shortly after I started here Hurricane Harvey came through Houston and demolished a lot of the town my parents lived in. Once the storm passed through a few upper management came to me and asked if I needed to go back to help and let me know that if I needed to help my family that came first and not to worry about the time off. There was staff that I had never met before asking if my family was okay and asking if there was anything they could do to help. I think this speaks to how much both HRP staff and management genuinely cares about the people that work here.

Q: What has been your favorite project so far?

A: My favorite project so far probably has been the move from the on-premises Exchange server to using Exchange Online. During this move there was a lot of moving parts and we had to do a lot of out-of-the-box thinking to make it as smooth of a transition as possible. It didn’t go as smooth as we would have liked since people actually noticed the move but we had to write multiple scripts for a variety of scenarios we had planned for.

Q: When you have 30 minutes of free-time, how do you pass the time?

A: When I have free-time I like to spend it playing with my kids and/or playing disc golf.

Q: What’s your favorite indoor/outdoor activity?

A: Despite spending a lot of my free time playing disc golf my favorite activity is actually swimming, I really enjoy getting into the pool and swimming laps or doing open water swims.

Q: If you could meet anyone, living or dead, who would you meet?

A: Prior to becoming a geologist I was actually going to school for Astrophysics and I still have a passion for space, if I could meet anyone living or dead it would likely be Werner Von Braun he helped develop the Saturn V rocket that got man on the moon.

What does Dominic mean to HRP? After our interview we reached out to his supervisor to get his thoughts:

Before I stole Dominic away from the field crew/DOT staff, I was struggling to maintain my sanity handling all of HRP’s IT needs.  Dominic had expressed an interest in IT and shown an aptitude for it while helping out a fellow HRP’er with a personal computer, so when the stars aligned (and Dan and Tad gave their approval) we began the brief process of transitioning him from a field worker to an IT associate.

Dominic quickly learned the ins-and-outs of IT within HRP and started handling many of the day-to-day IT functions.  He has been instrumental in identifying, testing, and implementing countless IT process improvements and enhancements that have significantly increased HRP’s efficiency and security within IT and throughout the company.  Dominic is always up to tackle new challenges or help someone in need (whether IT related or not) and addresses everything with a smile. In short, we would not be where we are today without Dominic’s contributions (and I would probably be locked away in an asylum somewhere)!

- Director of Information Technology, David Pramanik