Tim Diebolt is the latest DIT employee to be featured in “A Day in the Life.”  He is an application development section manager serving MDA and DEQ, and is also the acting Client Specialist for those departments.  Lately, he’s been spending more of his time as a Client Specialist work, but Tim says the work tends to overlap.

As an application development manager, Tim oversees a staff of about 24 people who maintain and support applications for MDA and DEQ.  In total, these two departments have about 270 applications which require routine maintenance, minor enhancements and business process analysis.  One example is the new MiTAPS project.  One of Tim’s staff members, Mark Breithart is the project manager and Tim says he is “doing a great job with MiTAPS and adding DEQ permits on the interface.”

Since he is an acting Client Specialist, Tim is responsible for ensuring quality service to his client agencies.  He met with the executive staffs of each department to develop division liaison positions.  The division liaisons were needed to improve communication to field level employees, since DEQ and MDA have a lot of employees who work in field offices or from home.

Tim is an early riser and generally starts his work day at 6:30 AM.  He usually spends the first couple hours of his day answering e-mail and getting a handle on the day’s issues, but he says, laughingly, that he always seems to be consumed with “interruptions or meetings.”  Any issues clients may have needs to be on the front burner, so he often has to put out some fires before moving onto the application development work.

Tim’s favorite part of the job is the chance to help people and resolve problems.  Whether the problems are simple or complex, he gets satisfaction out of keeping the clients happy.  The biggest challenge he faces is simply the amount of work; Tim has a lot on his plate so the work can sometimes be overwhelming.

Before coming to DIT, Tim worked for DEQ for almost 15 years and originally for Public Health.  He was a public sanitarian and went to work for the water division of DEQ, regulating water supplies and tracking samples.  His work then was done with a pen and paper, so he wrote a monitoring application that eliminated the paper and from that he became more and more involved in technology.  He then became an IT specialist and worked on the transition of data at DEQ.

Tim has a Bachelor’s Degree in Environmental Science from Grand Valley State and has done Master’s work in Electrical Engineering and Hydrology.  He also has his Project Management Master’s Certificate from George Washington.

Away from work, Tim is a baseball fanatic.  He attends, on average, 200 baseball games a year! He has two sons, one who goes to MSU and one who is in high school at Grand Ledge and is helping the younger son prepare for an upcoming goodwill trip to Australia for baseball.  Tim has served as the Vice President of Grand Ledge youth baseball for the last twelve years.  He also enjoys fishing, which he does when he has time.

Thanks for sharing a day in your life, Tim!