Intake
Standardized project creation, ownership, requirements, and readiness.
03
Enterprise workflow transformation
FLOWLINE
A practical operating system for SchoolMessenger implementation delivery - replacing disconnected project tracking with automated workflows, shared visibility, and a clearer way to manage seven products at once.
The problem
The work had outgrown the system managing it.
SchoolMessenger used NetSuite to coordinate website, mobile-app, communication-product, and content-migration implementations. It held the records, but it was not designed to manage the handoffs, dependencies, accountability, and real-time visibility required by a complex delivery organization.
Teams were accustomed to the existing process, so the challenge was larger than selecting a new tool. We needed to redesign how work moved across implementation, project management, design, quality assurance, and leadership - and earn adoption without disrupting active customer projects.
Conceptual workflow
A portfolio-safe representation of the operating model - not a reproduction of proprietary screens.
Implementation
Role-specific work queues and automatically created downstream tasks.
Design & QA
Visible handoffs, validation gates, exceptions, and escalation paths.
Launch
Completion controls, reporting, and customer-facing delivery status.
What I led
Platform selection
Co-conceived the operating model with my Director, helped select Jira, and translated delivery needs into a unified system.
Workflow architecture
Personally built custom workflows and automations that moved work across implementation, design, and QA while creating required tasks at the right moment.
Role-based visibility
Created dashboards, Kanban views, and wallboards for project managers, delivery teams, team leads, and senior leadership.
Adoption and training
Led hands-on training in U.S. and Canadian offices, including full project simulations that let teams practice every handoff before launch.
The operating result
One system became a shared language for delivery.
The transition used a controlled cutover: existing projects finished in NetSuite while new projects entered Jira. That protected active customer work and avoided a disruptive historical-data migration.
In its first year, approximately 75 users processed more than 50,000 Jira issues across seven product workflows. The organization's standard before-and-after reporting showed implementation throughput improved by approximately 35%.
The improvement was not simply the result of changing tools. Clearer ownership, automated handoffs, stale-work alerts, and role-based visibility made it easier to spot and address bottlenecks while work was still moving.
After launch, I established a weekly open improvement forum where any employee could propose changes. Those ideas became a managed backlog of workflow, automation, and dashboard enhancements - keeping the operating system useful as the organization changed.
Leading the organization
The system supported a larger delivery responsibility.
As Senior Manager, Implementation, I later led an approximately 55-person SchoolMessenger implementation organization across project management, design, content migration, application specialists, and related delivery functions. We managed more than 200 active customer implementations at a time, with an average active backlog of about $6 million.
I was responsible for staffing and capacity forecasting, implementation KPIs, portfolio reporting, delivery risks, and customer escalations. I worked with Sales, Support, Product, QA, Engineering, and company leadership to keep customer commitments aligned with delivery capacity and technical realities.
This was direct people leadership: primarily leading functional supervisors and project coordinators, developing clearer role levels and career paths, and building a leadership bench so daily delivery did not depend on one person. Those routines and shared operating views helped the organization maintain delivery during the COVID remote transition.
My later work at Wesco involved cross-team product capacity planning and delivery coordination, not management of a comparable implementation organization.
Leadership lessons
Design the work, not just the tool
The value came from clarifying ownership, dependencies, and decision points before configuring the platform.
Make adoption experiential
Teams gained confidence by walking real projects through the new system together before the cutover.
Keep improving after launch
The employee forum made frontline users co-owners of the operating system instead of passive recipients.
Preserve continuity
The phased transition improved the system while protecting customers and the delivery commitments already underway.