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The Shortest Pencil Beats the Longest Memory

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My husband is a woodworker. He reads, plans, makes notes, makes more notes, draws pictures, creates mock-ups from cardboard, practices his ideas on leftovers, figures out the cost of materials, scouts various hardware stores, and eventually he starts the actual building of a project. I frequently tell him he has all the hallmarks of a great project manager, although his projects seldom complete on the schedule I provide!

So this weekend, in his new issue of Fine Homebuilding magazine, he points out an article on “Trading in your hammer for a clipboard.” My personal and professional life collided.

I don’t have a good analogy for the hammer, but I can say that many of those tasks listed above have happened in various forms to bring the Web Refresh project team to this point.

We held our last intake meeting as part of the refresh initiative last week. Looking back through schedules from almost a year ago (Oct. 12, 2018), my forecast was that we would be done with the refresh by Aug. 9, 2019. My optimism prevailed as we were off and running with intake meetings nearly every week.

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And Then There Were 10

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Do you remember that feeling you had when you were on your way to your first day of school? A mix of excitement, anticipation, maybe a little fear and trepidation for the work that is to come? First days can be filled equally with mixed emotions for new employees.

Well, on the web team we have grown exponentially in the last year. First, Mike Flores joined Chris Gilligan in January and they have anchored our development work this year. And, on August 15, we increased the development team by one third. Bernardo Martinez is our newest web programmer and now part of the UTC web triumvirate.

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Sprinting to Go Live

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The finish line has been set for months.

The crowd grows anxious as the race date nears.

The race organizers wait with anticipation as the coach assures them everything is moving ahead as planned.

The racers have trained, trained and trained some more. They’ve met hurdles that seemed far too high. But through perseverance and dedication, they are nearing the starting line.

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The Fine Art of Following Up

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Nobody likes to be nagged. Whether it comes from your mom, your spouse, or your boss, it may have more to say about the nagger than the naggie.

To be a good project manager, one must find ways of following up that yield results over resentment. As I’ve discussed in previous blogs, a role of a project manager is to make sure a project completes on time, at or under budget and within scope. I also like to add a fourth element and that’s to maintain a positive, productive working relationship with all the stakeholders on a project. I’m happy if no one dies or is incarcerated as a result of a project I’ve managed!

Projects can easily get off track. Especially during summer, project participants go on vacation, take days off for holidays or generally are away from the office. Yet the project remains. So it is with our Website Refresh project.

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Be Our Guest

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If you’ve been to anything Disney, you know there’s an entire culture around visitors being treated as guests.  If you’ve shopped at Nordstrom’s or Williams-Sonoma, both hallmarks of customer service, the focus on understanding customers and making spaces inviting is paramount to what they do.  You don’t just buy a product, you have an overall experience.

With that thought in mind, the Web team is implementing a more robust way to collect your issues and requests.

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Tell Me a Story, Paint Me a Picture

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Why do you search the internet?

Maybe you’re looking for information, knowledge, news of the day. Maybe you have a goal in mind and need to find a specific answer to a question. For those who visit our UTC website, it could be to find out admissions requirements, program information in a specific college or where to pay a parking fine.

When we begin to consider who visits our website and why, the volume of people and reasons can become daunting. Between Jan. 1, 2018, and today, we’ve had 3,767,325 visits to the UTC.edu website homepage alone according to our Siteimprove analytics. That’s right—almost 4 million visits. And what brings them?

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April Showers Bring May Milestones

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Our April showers came in the way of website refresh “go-lives” with eight departments giving the green light to push their sites to production. April was, by far, our busiest month between intake meetings, site reviews and final edits.

As of the last day of April, we have managed to refresh/review 58 departmental or group sites (some with multiple subsites).

We’ve also passed the halfway point in terms of refreshed content and are sitting at 60 percent completed on the website refresh meter. How does that translate in page numbers, you ask? It puts us past the 2,500-page mark! [Read more…]

Spring Cleaning Sparks Joy

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I dedicate this post to Donny Behneman as my latest mantra has become “Does this webpage spark joy?” Or a variation, “Does this PDF spark joy?” Or “Does this photo spark joy?”

As we work our way through the UTC website, one topic in each intake meeting has to do with a review of pages that can potentially be deleted. Old, outdated content contributes, in large part, to the refresh effort. Schedules from 2014, a PDF form from 2011, a photo of a student who has long since graduated all come to light during the refresh process.

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Let’s Go To Camp

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Remember the summer days when time was spent in the great outdoors chasing friends through the woods and discovering new worlds? Or perhaps, summer camp might have been classes at a museum filled with art or at the zoo tending to the elephants. Camps and campers typically equate to fun, summertime activity.

June 7 and 8 will provide an opportunity to attend another type of camp…”Drupal Camp.” Rather than spending time in the great outdoors, the local Drupal community will set up camp at Chattanooga State to share in the adventures of using, programming and learning about all things Drupal.

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Time Marches On

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How do we predict how long it will take to <fill in the blank>? When it comes to initiatives or activities that have been done before, experience plays a pivotal role in determining outcome. On the other hand, luck may play just as much of a role in the end.

I’ve managed dozens and dozens of projects over the years. Based on my years of experience, I should be able to more or less accurately predict a project’s timeline. I also know that every project is different and, while I’m pretty good at identifying risk factors at the start of the project, there will always be something that comes up that no one thought of before. A bit like Murphy’s Law, but we’ll call it Whipple’s Hypothesis for now.

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