David is a Financial Specialist within the United States Department of Defense. Based out of Indianapolis, David and his team work largely on optimizing the civilian payroll system. With a background in business and experience in accounting, David helped conceive and implement the Phase Retirement program. Instead of completely leaving the company altogether, retirees now have the option to take on a mentorship role as their hours are gradually decreased into retirement.
Transcript
My name is David Hope. I work for the Department of Defense, DFAS, which is Defense Finance and Accounting Services. We pay the Military and the civilians of the Government, in the military. I'm a Financial Specialist. I kinda help design the civilian payroll software. Basically, a requirement will come in, build a report, make this screen look pretty, make it do this, not this. I'll design that, and give it to a programmer, to actually put the code in the system. So, that software will go out, and then we, we pay 2.2 million civilians out of our office. We pay the President, out of our office. A little bit of everything I've done there. I've done Payroll there, I've done Accounting there, Finance, HR. It's a place where you can go in different angles, different realms. And your degree can take you anywhere, at DFAS. Basically, I'm doing a lot of writing. It's a lot of writing, what I do. Microsoft Word. And I'll write five to a hundred pages, of analysis. You know, this system has a problem over here. It needs to be better, I'll do some research. You know, I could do 20 years of, why is it doing this, or what's it need to do? And come up with a plan, on my own. It needs to do this, this is why it's doing this, don't do this anymore. And talk to all the customers. Do you want it to do this, or what do you need it to do? And kind see what they want, instead of here's the problem, I'm just gonna go with it. I want their input, as much as possible. So everyday, I'm talking to customers, finding out what they want, and writing. You know, just writing a lot of documents. So we have a new, new thing called Phased Retirement, which I helped design, where you work part-time. You might work two hours a day, four, five, whatever you need. And you're basically a mentor, for the younger generation coming in, that don't have all that knowledge, that we want. So basically, you're only role would be a mentor. So I helped design that whole, the whole concept. A lot of time, it took over a year development, to put that into play, and now it's 100%.
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