Tag Archives: web project management

Profiles in Nerdery: Mike Woods, seriously.

• Astrological Sign: Cancer: shy, assertive, and loyal.
• Time at the Nerdery: ~1 year.
• Area of expertise: Getting it done.
• When people ask you what you do, how do you respond: I shrug.
• Favorite kinds of projects to work on: All of them.
• What one thing about The Nerdery surprises people the most when you tell them about it: That we have this annoying blogger who bugs me to do things that I really don’t want to do.
• Seven dream Jeopardy Categories: 1.) Twitter(@woods); 2.) Bug or Feature; 3.) Conversations you should never have over IM; 4.) Things that won’t work in IE6; 5.) @wiley_the_dog twitter status; 6.) Seriously you want to work on my team. Seriously.; and 7.) Apple.
• Favorite Fictional Nerd: Lisa Simpson.
• According to the Wikipedia entry on Nerd, some nerds show a pronounced interest in subjects which others tend to find dull or complex and difficult to comprehend, or overly mature for their age, especially topics related to science, disambiguation, mathematics and technology. Do you know what disambiguation is: Of course I do.

A job description that might give you goosebumps

The last time you slid behind the curtain at The Nerdery I was telling you all about The Wonder Twins and how a proposal comes to life. Today I am going to tell you about someone whose job description might make your pulse race and give you goosebumps. That person is Michelle, our production coordinator.

Goosebumps yet? Yeah, I didn’t think so. But get this, when I sat down with Michelle to talk about her role here at The Nerdery she said her job was basically to make sure that the projects we take on stay on budget and on time.

Yes, you read that right. When you boil down all that Michelle does, it comes to making sure that your projects are on budget and on time (it bears repeating, don’t you think?).

But before you get too excited, I have to break the news to you that Michelle doesn’t actually have any interaction with our clients. Nope, that’s the job of our SDMs (software development managers), who you’ll get to learn about later. Basically, Michelle helps the busy SDMs manage each project’s overall health.

Michelle has been instrumental in helping to develop roughly twelve different processes here at The Nerdery to make sure our projects get done as quickly and efficiently as possible. Now she gets to help implement these processes which include dealing with scope changes in a project and sending out timely status reports to clients.

“I’m the extra set of eyes to help manage things,” Michelle said. “I help the SDMs not lose site of the big picture. I get an overview of every project that we’re working on and since I don’t have to worry about the little details that go into each project I can monitor how many hours we’re working and help the SDMs get their ducks in a row.”

While this is only a small part of Michelle’s role here at Sierra Bravo, it’s probably the part that’s most important and interesting to you. The most important to us? Michelle gathers the shout outs and procures the beer for our weekly Bottlecap Talks.