How I Work

Good project management starts with good questions.

Structure creates clarity. Flexibility keeps it useful.

BUILDING THE PROJECT MANAGEMENT FUNCTION

Clayton Homes | Project & Creative Operations

THE CHALLENGE

Marketing projects involved multiple teams, competing priorities, creative deliverables, and plenty of moving parts. There wasn't a consistent process for taking work from an initial request through discovery, planning, execution, and completion.

WHAT I DID

I helped build the structure behind the work. That included developing the intake and discovery process, configuring and administering Teamwork.com, creating project boards and workflows, establishing documentation practices, and helping teams understand how to use the system.

I worked with creative, digital, social, communications, and business stakeholders to make sure the process supported the people doing the work — not just the project tracking.

THE RESULT

A more consistent framework for organizing projects, communicating expectations, tracking progress, and keeping stakeholders aligned. It helped turn project management from an informal coordination effort into a more structured, repeatable function.

BETTER QUESTIONS. BETTER PROJECTS.

Clayton Homes | Discovery & Intake Redesign

THE CHALLENGE

Project requests came in all shapes and sizes. Some had almost no useful information. Others included too much detail without answering the important questions. Dates were sometimes arbitrary, and project requirements could shift during discovery.

Meetings could end with little more than an agreement to meet again. By then, teams were spending time coordinating work that wasn't fully understood.

WHAT I DID

I recognized that the problem wasn't simply people filling out forms incorrectly. The process itself needed to support better conversations.

I developed a discovery-question framework to help uncover project goals, high-level scope, stakeholders, missing information, dependencies, assumptions, and questions that needed further exploration.

I also simplified the initial request form. The goal was to collect enough information to identify the right participants and start the conversation—not force stakeholders to define an entire project before they had the opportunity to work through it with the team.

THE RESULT

Discovery became more flexible and productive. Teams had better conversations earlier, fewer fundamental questions surfaced after work had started, and projects were less likely to undergo avoidable changes once execution was underway.

The bigger lesson: sometimes the best way to improve project delivery is to slow down long enough to understand what you're actually being asked to deliver.

BUILDING SYSTEMS PEOPLE ACTUALLY USE

Clayton Homes | Teamwork Implementation & Team Hubs

THE CHALLENGE

Before Teamwork became a more centralized part of the project-management process, project and day-to-day work information was scattered across spreadsheets, Word documents, Google Docs, and individual tracking methods.

The bigger challenge wasn't simply getting information into one platform. Different teams had different workflows, priorities, and levels of comfort with project-management software. A one-size-fits-all approach wasn't going to work.

WHAT I DID

I worked directly with teams to understand how they operated and where better visibility could help.

I created Team Hubs and business-as-usual (BAU) project structures that gave teams a place to organize and manage their ongoing work while maintaining visibility across the larger project portfolio.

Rather than forcing every team into an identical workflow, I demonstrated what Teamwork could do, explained how the pieces fit together, and gave teams room to experiment. I wanted people to understand that they could adapt their own workspace without breaking the larger system or interfering with another team's work.

The goal was adoption through collaboration—not compliance through configuration.

THE RESULT

Teams gained a more centralized way to organize ongoing work, while project managers gained better visibility into team activity and workload.

More importantly, teams that were initially hesitant about the system began asking for similar solutions for their own workflows.

That was the real measure of adoption: people weren't just being told to use the tool. They were seeing ways it could make their work easier.

COORDINATING THE DETAILS BEHIND THE CREATIVE

Clayton Homes | Lifestyle Photography Production

THE CHALLENGE

A lifestyle photography project involves a lot more than showing up with a camera. Production required coordination across models, wardrobe, facilities, home centers, travel, weather, budget, and third-party vendors. Each piece depended on the others, and a change in one area could affect the entire plan.

WHAT I DID

I built a detailed project plan that identified responsibilities, dependencies, and the logistics needed to bring the production together.

I coordinated the moving parts across the people and teams involved, established ownership, and accounted for potential disruptions. The plan also needed enough flexibility to respond when conditions changed without losing sight of the production goals.

THE RESULT

The team had a clearer picture of what needed to happen, who was responsible, and how the different pieces fit together. The planning created a practical framework for coordinating a complex creative production while remaining prepared to adapt along the way.

KEEPING A COMPLEX MIGRATION MOVING

Clayton Homes | Staffbase Migration

THE CHALLENGE

The Staffbase migration involved technical dependencies, multiple stakeholders, and details that weren't fully understood at the outset. As planning progressed, new information changed some of the original assumptions about how the work would be delivered.

WHAT I DID

Rather than force the project to follow a plan that no longer fit, I brought development into the planning process and worked to adapt the approach.

I helped shift the project toward a hybrid delivery model that accounted for development sprints while maintaining coordination across the broader project. That meant revisiting assumptions, adjusting expectations, and keeping stakeholders connected as the path forward evolved.

THE RESULT

The project continued moving forward with an approach better aligned to the technical work involved. It reinforced an important part of how I manage projects: a plan should provide direction, not prevent the team from responding to reality.