Project Management

While I have managed a slew of projects throughout my career, several projects, in particular, illustrate:

  • My attention to both the big picture and the smallest, yet still important, project details.
  • My ability to mobilize teams to deliver projects on time.
  • My ability to manage simultaneous portions of large projects.

These project examples also appear on my resume and include:

Key Advancements to www.kent.edu: www.kent.edu redesigns of institutional, regional campus and departmental websites (360 sites) via a transition from a proprietary content management system (CMS) to an open source CMS. One large scale endeavor involved a $439,000 project, which required:

  • Orchestration of campus-wide cooperation to adopt new design and transition to universal content management system, despite the fact that many entities had independently invested in proprietary redesign.
  • Development of timelines for more than 360 website migrations, prioritization of such timelines, management of these cross-divisional teams, working with various vendors, benchmarking of peer sites, trend monitoring, usability and user experience research, needs analysis, design oversight and development of a training model to support more than 600 web contributors.
  • Personnel management that extended to hiring and managing freelancers from four agencies, as well as 10 student employees, increasing supervisory responsibility to oversight of 29 employees.
  • Brought project in under budget and applied residual funding to temporary web accessibility coordinator position.
  • End result of one redesign was an award-winning website, which advanced the brand by bringing nearly all Regional Campuses, college and academic departments into the content management system with its first-time global masthead. See screen shots of Kent State’s website evolution.
  • Instituted web accessibility requirements and training plan in compliance with WCAG 2.0 standards.
  • Identified need for quality assurance tool and implemented a solution that decreased one college’s 350 broken links to 50; and reduced those for a regional campus’ from 170 to 20.

Key Advancements to FlashLine (portal):

  • Supported Luminis/Pipeline portal project implementation from infancy stages to enhanced rollout; directly related to $23,000,000 enterprise resource planning project that extended portal value to approximately 4,000 faculty/staff members and 35,000 students:
    • Reduced logins and increased connectivity to remaining disparate systems via single-sign-on access
    • Coordinated alignment of technical and functional team timelines
  • Due to continual immersion in this project and my understanding of how Luminis roles work:
    • Contributed to business rule discussions, needs and issues around system roles
    • Realized new student and new admit roles were feasible to support recruitment and retention processes
    • Counseled business units as to when a data extract can be produced and used to support messaging to a particular audience
  • Served as lead content administrator for portal, during which time core projects included:
    • Identified the need to resolve portal group abandonment issue that could impact retention, approached and worked with Information Services to partially automate maintenance of groups usage to prevent student disenchantment and support retention
    • Worked with portal administrators and Banner administrators to implement Google Analytics cross-domain tracking
    • Developed needs assessment, content and implementation plans for launches of new admit and new student tab launches to support recruitment and retention
    •  Initiated research with parents and spearheaded subsequent content development to support parent needs, retention, improved business processes and security measures, end result was a KSUview tab for parents
    • Based on user experience research around the label ‘My Account’ and expected functionality, worked with directors in enrollment management business units to develop a My Account tab to support business processes and simplify tasks required of students