Scott Swann retires after 35 years

After a 35-year Emory career, mostly spent in management and project management, Scott Swann has decided to hang up his tartan. So to speak.

Scott began at Emory on August 18, 1980, which has always been easy for him to remember because August 19 is his birthday. He started as a mainframe programmer with Emory Hospital IT. “This was before the Emory Healthcare merger,” said Scott, “and we were still using punch cards.”

In 1987, Emory merged the Crawford Hospital IT staff with Emory IT. There was a significant cultural difference in IT philosophy between the two groups, and in 1988, Scott left Emory to work for a couple of small software companies. Then in 1991, Emory Clinic IT hired him and he worked there for four years. In 1995, he was hired by the University into the University Information Services (UIS) as a senior mainframe programmer. He’s been with Emory ever since.

Scott first began to do management work in 1997, when Francene Mangham was managing Emory’s first PeopleSoft (PS) implementation. Scott became a manager on that project and soon thereafter managed Emory’s Y2K effort. During this time, Scott hired Byron Nash (who went on to become director of Enterprise Applications) to do the day-to-day management of Y2K.

After spending several years managing the finance team, including applications such as FAS, Imaging, R25, the purchasing system, Scott became the technical project manager of the initial Compass finance project in 2007. Scott ensured all of the legacy data was moved into the PS systems for the University and Healthcare. This was a two-year effort that went live in 2009, after which Scott took a permanent project management position in the Project Management Office (PMO).

Project management was a field that suited Scott. “When I am done with a project, I get to walk away,” he said. “I like that a lot better than nurturing software through its lifecycle.”

“Before Scott came to the PMO, I never knew how wickedly funny he could be,” remembers Marisa Benson, the former director of the PMO. “That group was already full of dry wits and Scott fit right in.” “Scott is a rare gem. He is super loyal to his friends and goes beyond the extra mile to help people,” added Trisha Wilson, a former co-worker in the PMO. “He will be missed greatly. I wish him the best on his next chapter.”

Life at Emory has not been all project management. As a direct descendant from a Scottish clan, Scott  suggested that Emory create an Emory Tartan, especially with St. Andrews in Edinburgh being Emory’s sister institution. Scott worked with Gary Hauk and the Emory Traditions Committee, created a committee for the tartan project, and created a design that Emory accepted as its own in 2009. National Tartan Day is April 6.

When asked what he would miss the most about his time at Emory, Scott said, “I will miss the people the most. After you work somewhere for decades, people become more than friends, they become family. When I started at Emory, my daughter had not been born. She ended up graduating from Emory.”

After leaving Emory, Scott plans to continue to manage some rental properties he owns near campus. He’s also a church treasurer, the membership chair for a couple of Celtic organizations, and has started a membership tracking company, called SCOTS (Scottish Clans Online Tracking System) for Celtic groups to keep up with one another.

Scott’s advice to his friends and co-workers is simply, “Don’t sweat the small stuff. Learn as much as you can about project management because you have to cover things you’ve never worked on before. You are always learning new things. Learn to like the people you work with because people will cooperate more if they like you. If they don’t like you they can kill your projects!”

He added, “Some of the finest people I have ever known or worked with are here at Emory.”