Dan Ulrich

• Brought in to rescue a multi-year, repeatedly stalled global migration off a roughly 15-year-old custom legacy Content Management System that had become a significant security and key-person risk, and built the visibility that let leadership target the highest-risk locations and make a resourcing decision to accelerate.

  Before this engagement, leadership had no reliable way to answer the questions that mattered most: when the migration could realistically finish, what was truly driving the delays, which global locations carried the greatest risk, and how added resources could accelerate the timeline. The aging platform was supportable by only a handful of remaining engineers, and updates ran on spreadsheets, meetings, and manually created narrative slides.

• Conducted a comprehensive assessment of program health and established a clearer view of completed work, remaining scope, delivery risks, ownership gaps, and reporting deficiencies across a complex multi-department global initiative.
• Designed and delivered a multi-persona Power BI dashboard that provided meaningful role-based visibility for executive leadership, program leaders, working teams, and data owners.
• Replaced labor-intensive slide-based and narrative-heavy status reporting with a more scalable enterprise reporting approach that improved leadership consumption and reduced reporting burden on project leads.
• Built complex data models and transformation logic using Power BI, Power Query, DAX, and related tools to convert inconsistent source data into reliable reporting outputs suitable for enterprise review.

  Gathered, normalized, and integrated fragmented data from large spreadsheets, collaboration tools, and other manual sources to create refreshable and reusable reporting structures for ongoing program tracking.

• Proposed more advanced progress-measurement methods, including a weighted and blended model, to help senior leaders better understand actual effort completed, effort remaining, and delivery exposure across a large global migration footprint.
• Applied company-approved AI tools to improve reporting accuracy, accelerate documentation, strengthen stakeholder communication, and increase delivery quality within enterprise governance guardrails.
• Created a comprehensive handoff package, including playbook, documentation, code assets, troubleshooting guidance, and a forward roadmap, to support continuity after unexpected funding reductions affected the program timeline.

• Owned Microsoft's non-standard capital channel end-to-end, managing the enterprise-wide intake path for roughly 100 new and largely unique high-risk requests each month — few fitting any standard template — across extremely diverse business segments that did not fit standard Azure Core infrastructure workflows.

  Supported capital governance for M&A entities, partially integrated acquisitions, sovereign cloud programs, government cloud investments, and security-sensitive initiatives operating under unique compliance and integration requirements.

• Redesigned Microsoft's Non-Standard Capital Council intake and governance workflow, improving clarity, transparency, and stakeholder trust for high-value capital submissions.

  Designed and personally implemented the phased adoption rollout for the redesigned governance operating model — individually mapped each stakeholder group's adoption barriers, sequenced the rollout so each group could trust the path before committing, and built the exception-handling paths that addressed the concerns that would otherwise have driven resistance.

• Increased monthly intake volume 38% and capital value 25%, supporting more than $100M in monthly new capital submissions across complex, high-risk requests.
• Maintained zero audit findings and secured a 96% approval rate across executive capital submissions aligned with GAAP, internal policy, and Microsoft financial governance standards.

  Coordinated capital submissions across 18 months aligned with GAAP, internal policy, Microsoft financial governance standards, data sovereignty, jurisdictional compliance, and security classification requirements — and identified and rerouted approximately 4 requests per month, about $5M in monthly spend, when submissions required OPEX treatment or alternate facilities routing, preventing audit risk and preserving reporting integrity.

• Drove AI-enabled program automation on a $100M/month capital program from a zero-automation baseline, replacing dependency on 5 vendors and 2 principal-level FTE subject-matter experts while maintaining continuity, governance standards, and zero audit findings.

  Designed and deployed AI-enabled workflow infrastructure using Copilot, SharePoint Agents, Power Platform, and Microsoft AI tooling to automate intake routing, submission-quality checks, review sequencing, stakeholder notifications, and executive reporting — built and operated entirely within Microsoft compliance and security guardrails.

• Automated intake workflows with Power Platform and SharePoint, improving throughput 40%, reducing dependency on manual coordination, and launching an out-of-band path for urgent security-sensitive requests.
• Built Microsoft's Security First capital review framework and co-led a monthly global forum with more than 100 stakeholders, raising attendance 25% and improving remediation follow-through for high-risk AI, sovereign cloud, government cloud, and security-sensitive investments.
• Served as the capital-governance touchpoint for major Microsoft acquisitions — including GitHub, LinkedIn, and Activision Blizzard King — whose non-standard capital requests routed through the channel, partnering with their engineering, finance, and program teams and shepherding submissions to clean approval under GAAP and Microsoft's internal accounting and financial-governance policies.

  Presented frequently at multiple levels within the acquired organizations, helped shape their business cases and Requests for Capital (CAPEX), and guided them on roadmaps to migrate onto Microsoft platforms — Azure, standard fabric, and Azure data centers.

• Led business analysis for a Microsoft supply-chain emissions (Scope 3) and supplier-finance reporting initiative, partnering across finance, procurement, supply chain, sustainability, and engineering teams.

  The initiative covered the kind of supply-chain (Scope 3) emissions tracking that underpins Microsoft's public commitment to be carbon negative by 2030.

• Mapped the full spend-and-emissions reconciliation lifecycle across internal systems and dozens of suppliers — exposing the data-quality and traceability gaps in supplier emissions baselines that limited readiness for automated, audit-ready reporting.
• Authored the cross-functional business requirements document (BRD), translating stakeholder outcomes, process gaps, and reporting needs into implementation-ready scope aligned to standard greenhouse-gas (GHG) accounting — scope later carried forward by a dedicated data-science team.
• Identified tooling and data architecture limitations in Excel-based and ad hoc Power BI reporting, recommending upstream changes to improve auditability, governance, and long-term reporting integrity.
• Delivered a structured handoff of documentation, stakeholder maps, and modernization recommendations, enabling continuity after the program ended.

• Managed cross-functional operating cadence for infrastructure programs by structuring calendars, agendas, forums, and follow-through that resolved blockers and maintained delivery momentum.
• Led KPI consolidation and fact table alignment across legacy systems for a five-year global lab consolidation program, creating a trusted reporting foundation for future automation and executive metrics.
• Developed executive-level reporting, stakeholder memos, and decision-support materials that translated infrastructure, financial, and operational data into clear actions for senior leaders.
• Standardized issue classification and root-cause logic, reducing triage delays and strengthening reliability reporting across engineering operations.
• Partnered with engineering teams on SQL-driven pipeline design, automation work, Agile ceremonies, sprint/task tracking, and documentation for analysts and engineers building secure data pipelines and dashboards.

• Directed executive business reviews by turning operational data into leadership-ready reporting tied to KPIs and OKRs.
• Designed the first operational dashboards and reporting tools for lab exits and space release across Microsoft's Redmond campus, replacing manual PowerPoint reporting with real-time visibility.
• Led business analysis for the redesign of Microsoft's infrastructure inventory system, then built a SQL, SharePoint, and Power BI-enabled tracking solution that improved migration status visibility, stakeholder documentation, and schedule-risk communication for more than 50 engineering teams.
• Built and redesigned lab closure workflows and intake models, surfacing business readiness gaps and improving executive visibility during campus rebuild and transition work.

• Owned Microsoft's internal Azure cost visibility tooling, supporting approximately $90M per month in cloud usage across more than 2,000 subscriptions and 1,800 registrations.
• Worked directly with the Azure Product Group and external tooling developers to evaluate build-versus-buy options and shape long-term enterprise cost management strategy.
• Led feature prioritization, stakeholder validation, and product feedback loops across more than 30 business units to improve real-time tracking and cost transparency.
• Provided requirements and business logic guidance for chargeback, accountability, and cross-business-unit cost governance.

• Built Microsoft's first internal Azure cost-planning infrastructure from a zero-measurement baseline — no cost models, forecasting tools, or tracking infrastructure existed — translating technical architecture decisions into financial models for compute, storage, and related services by working directly with the Azure Product Group.
• Delivered ±2% quarterly budget accuracy through variance analysis and structural cost-driver investigation — a result previously out of reach before the measurement infrastructure existed.
• Built internal chargeback models and rate-card tools that improved cost accountability and forecasting across business units.

• Identified the hidden variable driving chronic financial variance — a timing mismatch between physical delivery, invoice realization, and accounting close cycles across time zones and fiscal boundaries — by interviewing supply chain partners, datacenter leaders, and supplier executives globally rather than relying on internal reports.

  The mismatch was invisible to any specialist with a segmented view. Designed the fix in three layers grounded in existing systems — premium shipping protocols to specific financial hubs (Reno NV, Dublin) where accounting treatment made delivery timing predictable; tradeoff acceleration lanes to offset unavoidable supply chain delays with next-quarter items; CAPEX depreciation and OPEX mitigation paths mapped to the accounting calendar — moving a GM's portfolio from chronic missed targets to ±2% quarterly accuracy, requiring no new systems or budget increase.

• Managed financial planning for $210M in OPEX and $82M in CAPEX, producing multi-scenario models aligned with shifting business priorities and capital constraints.
• Built multi-scenario supplier proposals to absorb a $3.5M CAPEX reduction, landed within ±2% of revised targets, and preserved datacenter readiness through vendor concessions and procurement coordination.
• Led variance investigations and close support that improved accrual accuracy, forecast quality, and executive trust in financial planning outputs.

Early Career Highlights

• Led IT infrastructure projects in high-stakes operating environments, including vendor integrations, system upgrades, and budgets up to $10M
• Managed service operations, incident response, and SLA-driven support in globally distributed environments
• Designed and maintained enterprise systems, supported data center migrations, and contributed to early cloud-transition work
• Performed operational data analysis, built performance and financial reporting, and supported compliance and data protection audits
• Served as a U.S. Navy veteran, Electronic Technician First Class, with an honorable discharge