Brendan is an extremely skilled data practitioner versed in Python, SQL, Excel, and more. He was invested in creating infrastructure that would allow for our team to provide scalable services, products, and reports to clients big and small. Brendan wrote scripts that enhanced our productivity, which was an important time saver, solving problems for our team making our work more efficient. These included rapid list clean up and formatting everything from membership data to early vote information reducing hour long projects to minutes.
He used his abilities to not only do the projects that made our team more successful but also to show the team how to harness these skills. He achieved this teaching Python classes for our staff and client staff, helping staff to create macros in order to process repetitive tasks more quickly and coaching others to utilize complex databases and systems he helped to design and build with our IT department. He exercised patience and encouragement during these lessons, helping team members to feel capable and excited about learning high level technical skills often at incredibly busy times.
His main responsibility at the AFL-CIO was managing our multimillion record membership database. This membership data is the core of both our and our clients' campaign operations, and we would not be able to effectively campaign our members without it. He was an excellent project manager working with client IT Departments to acquire their data, vendors to append critical data, and client Political Directors to ensure they were getting the level of service they needed. Brendan also had an excellent eye for detail, catching and working with clients/vendors on errors that came up in this process that would disrupt program. He also worked closely with our IT Department to take a complicated and onerous system for processing this membership information to an efficient, streamlined one. This allowed for a structure that took our work far beyond previous processes, adding valuable information and analysis of lists for our clients to use for their work and understanding of their membership.
Brendan was incredibly dedicated to our organization. His departure was bittersweet, but he made sure to work with a current staff member to bring her up to speed over a two-month training period ensuring his leaving was a smooth process. During this time, he created a repository of documentation for processes and prior work as well as an incredibly well-documented codebase in our git version control system (GitLab) ensuring his historical knowledge while at the AFL-CIO is retained for the future.
Brendan was an incredibly valuable and essential member of our team willing to go above and beyond in his work duties and leaning in any time he was needed. He is not above helping anyone with their work and has a willingness to learn anything he needs to in order to do so.
