Process Management in Contexts of Cross-Functional Collaboration
By creating a “tasking lexicon” of active terms with concise definitions, I established the standard for assigning taskwork on my team at Teachstone. If an idea didn’t clearly sort into a pre-defined task, it wasn’t ready for assignment. The system promoted actionability among our collaborations, making us a more focused, efficient, productive team.
I devised and implemented a workflow for effectively translating publications across languages—regardless of team fluency. Through this creative empowerment of distinct roles with distinct responsibilities, we expanded the scope of our output beyond what we’d ever imagined before.
Months after I started at my first Fortune 500 company, they flew me to participate in a think tank with KPMG. The goal: map and document the annual production and publication of an expansive multimedia portfolio. I made the expected contributions of documenting our content team’s design and development phases. But more remarkably, I took up the initiative creating SOP and flowchart templates for the half dozen teams involved.
One of my teams in financial services produced monthly, quarterly, and annual reports. Each one collected risk and regulatory updates from across the compliance department, entailing collaboration with roughly 20 SMEs. Regardless of the complexity of all these productions, our deadlines—tied to the calendars of executives, boards, and even external authorities—were outright unbudgeable. I spearheaded the necessary effort of clarifying, sorting, and documenting our QA standards into a series of more focused reviews.
QA Scripts
You could reasonably call quality assurance scripts the “bread and butter” of my contributions to team operations. I’ve had a productive stamp on every script from every working phase of every team that’s ever employed me. (Come to think of it, creating rubrics as a college instructor was my first effort to this effect.) But here I’ll stick to the scripts that I myself have written outright:
Gradational review scripts across design and development phases for adherence to variance in service level agreement
Proprietary lexicon review script for vendor-produced translations
E-book and fillable form functionality checklists
High-level review scripts for accessibility, DEI, compliance, etc.
Functionality scripts for online experiences
Proofread process documents/scripts
Project Management
I served as project manager through the launch of several innovative products at Teachstone, including an instructional support kit for teachers, teaching strategy cards, and online learning experiences about trauma-informed childcare. As for the last project I managed at the company, my estimated time to complete was over 85% accurate. Obviously, that data point presents room for greater accuracy. What I’m highlighting is the breadth of my project management experience: from planning through execution, tracking, and reporting.
When I moved from a startup to a corporation literally 160 times bigger, I found dramatic differences in operational approach. I found less formality, in fact. Introducing the group to kanban boards and SLAs were some of my first, productive contributions.
I built out the implementation of a project management tool (Smartsheet) for my team in 2024. Ultimately, the work yielded a dashboard collecting 44 performance metrics for our leadership—a degree of insight they’ve never had before.
