A Day in the Life of Mike Pedersen
1. Thank you for joining me for this month’s New Year’s edition of the “Tech Manager Spotlight.” Start by telling us a little about what you do and a little about your background.
Happy New Year! Thank you so much for choosing me for your Tech Manager Spotlight this month! I am currently the Audiovisual Experience Manager at Iowa State University (ISU). In this role, my primary mandate is the care and feeding of 214 classrooms that are centrally managed and scheduled by the University administration and designated as “General University Classrooms.” As a side gig, we act as an in-house consultant and integrator for any other audiovisual projects that occur anywhere across campus. Our team is currently up to 6 full-time employees (including me) and 3 student employees.
I’ve only been at ISU since July 2018; prior to that, I worked for 19 years for an audiovisual integration company called Mechdyne Corporation. At Mechdyne I did a little of everything from Project Manager to IT Manager to Engineering Manager to R&D and ultimately as a Solution Engineer (Sales Engineer).
2. Have you always worked in AV? What did the path look like for you to get to where you are now?
I’ve worked in AV for a long time, but I have not always worked in AV. My educational background is in Mechanical Engineering so my first couple of jobs were more focused on that direction. I worked for a company called Engineering Animation, Inc. where we would create animations with models and physics as accurately and scientifically as possible for court cases to help explain complex concepts; it actually involved modeling a lot of accident reconstructions. I then worked for John Deere for 3 years designing and testing large row-crop tractors.
After that, I joined Mechdyne. When I first joined Mechdyne the company was only focused on building large immersive virtual environments; the classical configuration was the CAVE (CAVE Automated Virtual Environment) that was typically an 8’x8’x8’ cube (sometimes up to 10’ on a side) where three vertical walls were rear-projection screens and the floor was front projected. I did work on some full 6-sided systems where the floor and ceiling were also rear-projected. Early on, the systems were driven by one or more Silicon Graphics (SGI) graphical supercomputers. It was almost always stereoscopic 3D. The projectors at the time were 3-tube CRT projectors – normally 9” tubes for our systems, but sometimes up to a 12” tube. The lightpaths were typically folded with one or two mirrors to minimize floor space. They were used for any number of science or engineering applications from heavy equipment design to oil and gas exploration.
To start, the AV was very minimal; we would directly connect the SGI to the projectors and maybe add an amp and a couple of speakers. Over time, clients began to ask us to add various things to the virtual environments – a switcher so they could have more than one computer, a microphone, an audioconference or videoconference system, full surround sound, etc. As the years progressed, we ultimately learned every Pro AV subsystem and found ourselves with all the skills a general AV integrator would have. I sat for the CTS test on a whim and passed it cold. So, we started to add more side room systems and bid on more general AV projects. I ultimately got my CTS-D and CTS-I. Mechdyne still has a very unique niche in large-screen visualization and VR, but a large segment of their business is now general AV.
After a while, it became clear my career path was stalled at Mechdyne. ISU is my alma-mater, so I started looking for AV opportunities there. When this current position came open, I applied for it and jumped from external integrator to in-house integrator.
3. In 2018, you were recognized by AVIXA as the CTS holder of the year. How did this affect your success in your role and in the industry?
Winning CTS Holder of the Year in 2018 was an amazing experience. It came as a total surprise, though. My teammates (largely the Marketing Team at the time) submitted my name and application without me even knowing about it. I was sitting at a track meet watching my son run when I received the e-mail that I had won; I looked at it for a long time wondering if it was some kind of joke or elaborate phishing attempt. Then the realization struck that it was for real. I started laughing out loud (I think the folks in the stands around me must have wondered about me), and was just giddy for the rest of the day.
Honestly, though, I can’t really be sure if it has had any clear positive impact on the success of my career or in the Pro AV industry. I won in June 2018 and left Mechdyne in July, so there was no opportunity for Mechdyne to use it help win sales, and I’m pretty sure most people at ISU don’t know about it and probably wouldn’t care much if they did – it just wouldn’t register for them. It probably made AVIXA’s decision easier when I volunteered for Chair of the Tech Managers Council, and it may have helped sway some votes to get me elected into the AVIXA Certification Steering Committee. But largely it is just an honor and great memory I’ll be able to hang on to.
4. What is your morning routine?
I typically hop in the shower around 6:30, do a quick e-mail and social media check, and then make some breakfast to go; breakfast is typically a travel mug of hot tea (earl gray) and some peanut butter toast. My son and I leave around 7:35, I drop him off at school and I arrive at work around 7:55. (Yes, yes, I know I should work out and/or spend some time in Bible reading and prayer… Maybe next year!)
5. What does an average week-day look like for you?
I spend a few minutes on e-mail, then have a daily team check-in with my supervisor and IT Services (ITS) peer managers at 8:15. After that, I move on to whatever is on the agenda! One of the best things about this job is that there really is not much of a “typical” day – each day can be very different. I find myself in a lot of e-mail and meetings. I do a lot of hardware ordering and checking in. My team then does a daily check-in at noon where we briefly share what we have been doing, what we plan to do, and any challenges we could use some help with. Other typical things include doing needs-analysis and site survey meetings with clients, designing the solutions, and producing estimates. I find my most productive groove typically from 2-5 and head out around 5:30.
When I get home, I check in with the family and talk about our days and figure out some dinner. Typically, several nights a week we have some type of church activity (my wife is a minister) but less lately with COVID. We check in on homework with our High School age son, and then often watch some TV before heading to bed around 11.
6. What does your busiest day look like? What are the challenges your role faces, and how do you overcome those?
I’m sure like most AV folks in higher education, our busiest days are the two weeks before and the first two weeks of each semester; maybe a little longer for the fall semester than the spring semester. That’s the time when, as they say, “things get real.” We are rushing to finish any classroom checks not yet completed, fix any last problems found, and put the finishing touches on any projects in progress; they can be 60-70 hour weeks. Then we have long days as classes start making sure everything is working as expected, answer questions from instructors, and fixing any issues that arise. Outside those few weeks, my busiest days are typically those days that are blocked solid with meetings, then you need to stay a little later to get any actual action items completed.
One of the biggest challenges my role faces is that I am simply under-funded and probably a bit under-staffed. I have great intentions of eventually ramping up our number of student employees and training them more extensively to help with the staffing challenges, but that has been hard to start in a COVID environment. For budget, I have a slide deck that I keep pretty well updated that explains how much we need to keep up with classroom technology refresh cycles and how much money we actually get; I show that presentation as often as I can to whoever in the administration will listen. Then we just simply prioritize to spend the amount we have in the rooms with the oldest or most unpredictable AV solutions.
7. What energizes you and inspires you?
Wow, that’s a great question. I will say that I love working in a university environment. I think teaching the next generation and pursuing research are incredibly noble pursuits! Unlike most-private sector research, university research is not necessarily constrained or limited by the potential for generating cash-flow. Likewise, I love teaching others; it is always a good day when I can share some insight with my team or others that help make them better audiovisual professionals. From a day-to-day perspective, something else that energizes me are those projects that require some ingenuity and creativity to pull off successfully; when I am deep in designing one of those types of projects I can get lost in the work.
8. If another tech manager were to follow you around all day, what would they most be surprised by? What would they learn?
I highly doubt many tech managers would be surprised by much if they were to follow me around; I would suspect our days are often very similar. However, if the tech manager was from a smaller school, they might be surprised how much of my time is spent essentially doing sales work within the campus. While we are centrally funded for the 214 General University Classrooms, any other AV work we do on campus is “fee-for-service” or “cost-recovery.” As such I spend a lot of time out meeting with potential clients (departments, colleges, centers), doing a needs analysis with them to determine what experience they are looking for, and then designing and sending them a written estimate. In fact, we use the D-Tools software created for AV integrators for our design work and producing formal well-formatted estimates. They might learn exactly how much like an integration company we actually operate as.
9. Tell us about the project you are currently working on now?
“The” project, LOL! As if there were only one! We currently have 66 “active” projects on our project tracking software; 29 in a pre-consult or design stage, 10 where the estimate is completed but not yet approved, and 27 that have been approved and are in some stage of project activity. But let me give you a couple of examples. Our team is currently installing a nice conference room for a department on campus. It will have an 85” display, two cameras, a Shure ceiling array mic, an integrated phone bridge, and a USB bridge (Extron MediaPort 200). Sources will include a house PC, HDMI laptop connection, and a Mersive Solstice Pod for wireless connectivity. On the other end of the spectrum, we just completed our new Student Innovation Center. This is a whole new building from scratch where I served more as an in-house consultant and owner representative working with the selected audiovisual integrator. This new 140,000 square feet building that cost over $84 million. The AV is largely AV-over-IP-centric with around 225 Extron NAV endpoints and over 100 Mersive Solstice Pods. There were almost 800 IP address reservations just for AV equipment. Yeah, that project is definitely a kid-in-a-candy-store kinda thing for anyone involved in Pro AV!
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10. Comparing your career path over time, what are some of the moments, accomplishments, or projects that you’re most proud of?
There are so many interesting tidbits in my career! Clearly being the CTS Holder of the Year in 2018 was one of the pinnacle moments! I’m also honored to be chair of the AVIXA Technology Managers Council and having been voted onto the AVIXA Certification Steering Committee. I’m also proud of the volunteer work I’ve done to advocate for STEM education including being appointed by the Iowa Governor to the North Central Iowa Regional STEM Advisory Board.
One of the early AV projects I am proud of is an auditorium here at ISU, the Alliant Energy-Lee Liu Auditorium in Howe Hall. I helped design and install that system for the first time in 1999-2000 while I was working for Mechdyne Corporation. I kinda threw everything and the kitchen sink into that project back then: A production style GPS-based master clock system, production intercom, multiple cameras, every imaginable media format at the time (DAT Tape, Cassette Tape, Minidisk, CD-R, DVD, VCR, etc.), a Peavey MediaMatrix with CobraNet extension, dual blended projection, document camera (which was a little new still then), and more. The technical room owner from ISU has told me many times that others thought it was overkill, but he said there wasn’t a single component or system that didn’t come into use eventually in that room. I oversaw two major and several minor technology refreshes of that space after that while still at Mechdyne, each time trying to think outside the box about what they might need. I guess that space will always have a special place in my heart.
There are so many other crazy spaces; a 6-sided immersive CAVE system at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia where I collaborated with Meyer Sound to develop a full 24.4 surround sound system with SpaceMap and their Virtual Room Acoustic System (VRAS). I was the lead designer on an entire suite of virtual environments for Sandia National Laboratories including a blended and rear-projected stereoscopic table. I was the lead designer on the first iteration of the Boeing Virtual Warfare Center in St. Louis with an auditorium where each pair of seats had an individually addressed mic and speaker and the whole room was set up where each mic would play out of all the speakers with a full mix-minus getting louder out of speakers further away in an expanding set of concentric circles. I helped design a full technology refresh for the Morrison Planetarium at the California Academy of Sciences with a custom-built video switching system (Dome Display Manager or DDM) that could cross-fade between two DisplayPort sources at 4K60 4:4:4 while also managing warping and blending. There are simply too many others to list!
11. What do you enjoy doing on weekends? How do you spend your time outside of work?
Historically I have spent a lot of time in church ministry activities on evenings and weekends (a little less so lately due to COVID). It is also the time I spend on home improvement and maintenance activities (not that I necessarily always enjoy that!). I spend more time than I care to admit just watching TV; I love Sci-Fi (The Mandalorian, The Umbrella Academy, currently binge-watching The Expanse), fantasy, and spy shows. I seriously need to get some kind of real hobby…
12. It seems that you stay quite busy and have a demanding job, how do you maintain work-life balance?
Actually, your question may not be as accurate as you think! With the exception of the few weeks around the start of any semester, I rarely work more than 50 hours in a week. (I suspect I may have just lost some respect from some peers!) I may have some volunteer activities, such as involvement with STEM/STEAM advocacy that take a few additional hours, but otherwise, I try to be available to my family any time I’m not working. Largely our church and ministry activities are a family affair. I suspect this family-focus is part of the reason why I might not have much time for hobbies.
13. What is your life motto and how do you apply it to your daily routine?
I guess I’m not sure if I have a life motto per se. I would like to think that my actions are at least partially guided by my Christian faith. As one specific example, I try to provide servant leadership to my team, and while I still have a lot of growth potential, I’ll try not to ever ask my team to do something I have not or would not do. I try to be one of the first to arrive and the last one out the door. If any member of my team is working on a holiday or weekend, I’ll make every effort to be on campus for the entire duration they are.
14. What does summer pre-planning look like both for Iowa State University and you personally?
Our school works on a fiscal year basis from July 1 to June 30. This year I already spent a significant portion of my annual budget on lecture capture and remote conferencing technology to get our classrooms ready for hybrid classes. We were woefully unprepared as only around 10% of our classrooms had any form of lecture capture prior to this year. As such, accounting for normal encumbrances expected, we are already in the red for our annual budget allotment. So, my summer pre-planning is starting off very differently.
My first step is to continue to work with my administration to attempt to get federal or state COVID funding to recover some of the hybrid technology money already spent. Essentially, I need to know how much, if any, money I’ll have to work with this summer. There were a number of general AV upgrades that we had planned to do last summer that got postponed to move to hybrid tech projects. So, we already have most or all of the hardware needed for those projects on shelves here. At a minimum, we’ll be able to complete most of those next summer.
If we do get some additional funding, I’ll work with my team to prioritize which rooms are the oldest or produce the highest number of tickets, and we’ll create a project upgrade list. We’ll evaluate our hardware inventory to see what components we’ll need to buy. Then we’ll go out and do pre-project site evaluations in each room to figure out what, if any, infrastructure support or changes will be required. We’ll make any needed individual design changes for each room from our classroom standards. We’ll then buy the hardware and stage it for summer installs.
This Month’s Manager: Mike Pedersen
Mike Pedersen joined Iowa State University in the summer of 2018 as the Audiovisual Experience Manager. Mike has been working in the engineering industry for over 26 years. For the last 21 years, he has been focused on the professional audiovisual (AV) industry where he has become recognized as an expert. He holds both the Certified Technology Specialist (CTS) certifications in Design (CTS-D) and Installation (CTS-I); he is one of the approximately 520 people in the world to hold both certifications. In 2018, the Audiovisual and Integrated Experience Association (AVIXA), the primary industry association for professional AV, recognized Mike as CTS Holder of the Year. He currently serves as Chair of the Technology Manager’s Council and a member of the Certification Steering Committee for AVIXA. Mike is a founding member of the Higher Education Technology Managers Alliance (HETMA) and co-founder of the Big 12 Technology Manager’s Alliance.
At Iowa State, Mike leads a team responsible for maintaining the AV systems in over 200 general university classrooms. The Audiovisual Experience Team (AVXT) also assists with AV consulting, installation, and repairs in college and departmental spaces across the university. Mike spends extensive time meeting with individuals to find out how audiovisual systems can make them better in whatever role they serve.
Prior to joining Iowa State, Mike worked for the AV Engineering and Integration firm Mechdyne Corporation for almost 19 years. While at Mechdyne he served several roles including systems engineer, IT manager, manager of project engineering, research and development, and pre-sales engineering. He taught classes on AV extensively both inside and outside of Mechdyne. He has also previously worked for John Deere and Engineering Animation Incorporated (EAI).
Mike is an active volunteer in the community. He advocates extensively for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education. He is currently a governor appointee to the governor’s North Central Iowa Regional STEM Advisory Board. He has served as chair of the Project Lead the Way (PLTW) partnership team for the Marshalltown Community School District and on the advisory board for the Broadcasting/Digital Media program at Marshalltown Community College. He has also been very active in the churches he has attended, serving in many leadership roles including Elder and Technology Leader.
Mike is a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) where he served as chair of the Central Iowa Section. Mike is a past invited participant to the National Security Forum (NSF.) In addition to the CTS certificates, Mike holds certificates in ITIL Foundation, Extron Audiovisual Associate (EAVA), and OSHA-10.
Mike is a 1994 graduate of Iowa State University with a Bachelor of Science degree with distinction in Mechanical Engineering and a minor in History.