Drew Wilkinson

My name is Drew Wilkinson and this is my personal and professional blog. On this site, you will see posts about business, technology, and other things in the world that I find interesting or think that you may find interesting.

I am a technology project manager who’s career has taken an interesting road. Right out of grad school, I started as a consultant doing business analyst work. My manager on that project saw the potential in me to become a project manager myself. She instructed me to take on addition project responsibilities & sent me to classes. Before long, I was rounding out my skill set with development classes so I could better understand the teams I would be managing.

After moving around through a few projects, I landed as a manager over a global implementation of Siebel and a support team that was placed globally to support the system around the world and around the clock. This was one of my most challenging positions, but it also provided me with a lot of lessons learned that I still apply today in my career.

I decided to leave that role and enter the world of corporate project management working with a major US based Internet service provider (ISP). After 5 years working as a consultant, this was my first experience with project management the way it was meant to be, formal, but flexible. I was part of the creation of a Project Management Office (PMO) and I enjoyed creating these new standards & practices to help run projects more efficiently and with proper accountability.

My next career move was back to consulting, but this time, I moved into a whole new area, web design. Up to this point, I had primarily focused on system development, implementation, and product support. Moving into web design and development was new, but a lot of the same project management rules still applied. Instead of managing teams of programmers, business analysts, and testers, I was now over teams of people doing user experience, creative design, Photoshop, Flash, and web developers. It was a change for the better because I have always had an affinity for the Internet and what I saw as unlimited potential.

After a year of consulting with the agency, I took a position within the dot com group of a major retailer as a project manager. Today I support and manage part of one of the highest traffic retail websites in the world. Every day presents a new challenge as we balance the wants and desires of the merchandising divisions and the dynamic of new technology. It’s a very cool job that brings me to the forefront of new technology and leveraging my business skills while staying in touch with my creative side.