Within a month of working at Florida University Southeast as a content strategist, I was appointed to the project manager role of a website redesign project that addressed the visual attractiveness (make it more modern), the user experience and the conversion rates with the aim of improving the school’s perception and reputation in the eyes of potential investors. The website redesign was a crucial element of an investment portfolio that was being put together to then be presented to potential investors and further the schools mission to make life-changing education accessible at a lower cost. This project adhered to an agile framework and had just kicked off when I onboarded the organization as an intern.

However, there was not yet any documentation that identified the stakeholder’s goals, enumerated the redesign requirements, no clear identification of the project scope, no documentation that housed member roles, itemized tasks and delegated tasks; nor was there a sprint schedule nor a firm completion deadline the stakeholder had provided. From my first meeting, I began to take notes during our daily progress calls to record changing requirements, decisions and action items. Noting the inefficiencies, I began to build a strategy first identifying clearly the existing challenges of the website our client wanted us to address, determining the scope, and requesting a deadline we should aim for. 

Functioning as the project lead the project initiated with a roadmap I proposed beginning by first hosting a requirements gathering session where the team learned the stakeholder objectives. Following the meeting, the next task would be to evaluate the existing website which I facilitated by building a sitemap so we can better visualize inefficiencies in information hierarchy and whether or not we are providing content for our intended audience. I assigned the team to evaluate the site making note of what can be further optimized. Prior to conducting an evaluation, we were already researching what requirements that typically go into educational websites, particularly higher education websites. This research also included looking at what our competitors are doing. Given a short 2 month turnaround period, in true Agile spirit, we produced a tentative list of user personas from which we extracted a minimum feature set which served as a scope as we identified which features to proceed with and which can be pursued at later phases of the project. This will allow us to get started with wireframing because we have an agreed upon set of requirements that we can proceed with. Thus, we were able to begin Figma mockups and concurrently build a style guide. Finally, this roadmap concludes with the conclusion of the first sprint by meeting with our stakeholder to discuss the wireframing, the copywriting, the visual identity we have proposed aiming for a yes/no meeting situated in granular decision making and avoiding high-level theoretical conversations that leave matters open-ended and rarely arrive at a decision. From our call with a stakeholder call, we will then proceed to iterate on what we have demo-ed. My role as a project manager for the project, I was at first afraid I would micromanage the team members or that I didn’t have a vision that we could all come together on and indeed during the first meeting I led, I was nervous and my voice was shaky, the meeting ran way overtime and people were left wondering what their task was. Humiliated, I sat down that very same day and created a full roadmap and though many aspects of this new project were up in the air, I took what we knew was agreed-upon, filled in the gaps with a lot of research and provided a definitive granular set of tasks and a sprint-timeline that accounted for known aspect of the project. I proposed this to the team making sure they knew it is only a draft and that I may be working with blindspots. Every member is a subject matter expert so with the foundation I provided, they were able to chime in by adding and taking away from the proposal in order to create a robust schedule and at times, warning me that my proposal is too specific and might stifle member autonomy plus should make room for unanticipated changes and these amendments were taken care of early thanks to open communication and transparency. In some cases, we entirely veered off our anticipated plan due to changing circumstances but we were again able to recoup by adhering to the agile spirit of determining what we know for sure and iterating on that. Ultimately, my teammates and stakeholders now marvel that this is my first project management role, exclaiming it’s as if I have done it before.