Optimization by Design: Admin (2018 – Current)

Optimization, Integration, Organizational Design, Analysis. I like to say leadership starts from an administrative prospective.

Admin is the unsung hero of most businesses – the fundamental beating heart of good habits for growth and learning, transparency, equity, optimization, analysis and future planning.. My love of visualizing organizational solutions for simple and fair processes has always been my doorway into creating solutions and leadership.

I fell in love with a project management software and it changed the way I organized my thoughts.

You are about to enter a fictional, digital world.

For the last 4 years I have been working with and experimenting with project management tools. I enjoy learning and implementing new technologies – but in particular I like organizing and mapping out functional systems and solutions which eliminate inefficiencies and automate repetitive processes

It’s All About the Tools – Current Primary Project Management Tools

Wrike
Slack
Citrix
Google Docs, Calendar, Sheets
Excel
Word
Autocrit
Grammarly
Canva
Webmail
OneNote
MilaNote
Adobe Acrobat
Various others tools

Featured Projects for Tools I have built:

Shortly after I started working at my current place of work, I helped transition our company’s multiple admin workflows into a new project management flow that had my team building process and optimizing tools from the ground up. The amount of work we were able to optimize and consolidate was incredible and where I first truly began to fall in love with what one could accomplish through building and designing solutions.

Support Reports: I love analysis. There is just something about that 4th hour into an excel sheet, or a project template integrating with a custom status and wrike report where you know, your brain doesn’t work the same way everyone else’s does. I think it may have something to do with the way I visualize data.

However, I can’t stress enough, that while I love building out and optimizing solutions, metrics should never be used for micro managing teammates. Data becomes dangerous when it is used as a tool to control and not for future planning, transparency and accountability.

Data is much more interesting when it is used to highlight what can be accomplished. For the last four years, I have taken point on learning the programs, understanding the fields and the associated systems of the tools my teams use and auditing, analyzing and reporting out on what has become one of the highest performing teams in the company.

Slack/Wrike Integration Team Stream Channels:

About a year ago I started working on building out channels and integrations from Wrike to Slack, alongside new standard operating procedures pointed at enhancing our teams ability to fully reference client and team work as well as engage with said work more effectively across multiple departments. It has been incredibly rewarding to see how this idea I had and then implemented and then introduced, is quietly growing in effectiveness, and widely automating informing, and optimizing collaboration, coordination and communication across all departments .

Wrike/Resource Management and Training Calendar

Training and resource management has become even more crucial in an ever growing virtual environment, especially in small businesses built on unique processes. For several years now I have worked to build, introduce and implement training solutions that have been adopted across multiple teams and departments.

Wrike Support Ticketing System

When I first started creating dashboards and working out solutions for how to optimize task processing with my team, I didn’t realize I was hacking a project management system and building a support ticketing system until several years later when I was asked to look at ticketing systems and realized the one I had built was out performing the ones I was being asked to evaluate.

Audits, automations and prioritizing pro-active initiatives.

Over the years I have designed several audits, which have evolved and transitioned and continue to be beneficial and relevant.

I like to build and optimize audits which have high impact on improving retention, minimizing escalations and saving the team time and negative impact. Over the years I have learned how to take my audits to the engineering department for review and implement automation of these audits. It’s is amazing to see how significant, one small improvement an audit, or one automation an audit can have over the course of say 3 years.

Foundational Short Reading List: Leadership and Communication

Although, I have read a significant number of books Here is a list of texts which I have encountered in my career that have deeply informed my understanding of communication and leadership.