Meet Chris Jones, a Program Manager in FieldCore’s Value Stream organization.
- Chris, tell us a bit about your background.
I was born and raised in California. I worked as a carpenter for a few months after school. In 2006, a family friend encouraged me to join the union as a millwright apprentice. It’s a 5-year program where you learn the millwright trade: installation, maintenance, and repair of industrial machinery and equipment. After completing my apprenticeship, I became a journeyman, then a foreman, then a superintendent. I joined our APM business as a Resource Manager, ultimately becoming a Division Leader working in the West region. In 2021, I accepted my current role as a program manager on FieldCore’s value stream team.
- Tell us about your current team and role.
In FieldCore’s value stream organization, we work to improve our field services offerings. We look at outage planning and execution through a “Lean” lens – thinking about how we can simplify and standardize outage tasks. As a program manager on this team, I’m a jack of all trades – I work on everything from content development for our digital outage tools (learn about Live Outage here) to creating new tooling solutions. On a given day I could be working on app development, budgeting, or even building training content – which keeps it interesting!
- What do you like about your role?
In this role, I really appreciate having the opportunity to explore and pursue ideas that can help our field teams or our business at large. Working in the field, we sometimes see opportunities for improvement but don’t have time to come up with broad or longer-term solutions. It’s so rewarding to be able to approach these challenges with a cross-functional team and solve them collaboratively – you see a problem; you go fix it. I’ve found that our FieldCore leaders are incredibly supportive of this approach and minimize as much “red tape” as possible to help us implement solutions quickly in the field.
- When you’re not working, what do you like to do?
I enjoy surfing, snowboarding, skateboarding, and gardening. I think skydiving is boring compared to surfing! I also like comics and movies … I’m a Star Wars fan. I love to spend time with my wife, Sarah, our daughter McKenzie (7), and our son, Hendrix (3).
• What advice would you give to someone starting their career in the field today?
I would say two things: first, anything worth doing is worth doing right. Sometimes the challenge is figuring out what’s right! Second, don’t ever be afraid to confirm details or ask questions about your parachute before jumping out of an airplane – it’s always better to ask.
