Work has been crazy lately. I am a project manager, and as I’ve mentioned before I’m not actually part of any IT department in my company. I don’t on paper have any sort of an IT job. I work for the Operations division in Management and I am over several projects and I work on several teams as the project manager. One of my particular projects is revamping the current company Sharepoint site (which is a huge, ugly, unorganized mess) and fulfilling support requests for the existing Sharepoint site and the future revamped site.
So while I’ve been going to meetings (virtually, I work at home) and answering support requests and setting up new team sites for people, I’ve also been knee-deep in HTML and CSS code making Sharepoint do things it shouldn’t do out-of-the-box. I’ve been learning a lot more about Sharepoint than I ever really wanted.
Speaking generally, the project began with me looking at the current site and going “No, this will not do,” and going to my personal PC and pulling up Photoshop and mocking up a really awesome version of the site. I also split the concept into two sites – a front door page that would face our entire parent company, and a back door page that we would use internally to collaborate. There’s a lot of other internal red-tape B.S. that had to be dealt with about what kinds of sites can go where and why, but that’s all boring. We dealt with it.
The stage we’re at now is taking this boring default out-of-the-box template that we aren’t technically allowed to edit or change, and using a Content Editor Webpart to inject custom CSS code to change the style of the page, and matching the site’s theme colors with the parent company’s new branding. Hell, I even designed a brand new logo for them to update the old one. My coworker (who’s also been my best friend for most of my life, incidentally) is really good with Photoshop and made some custom graphics for the home page, so the current test site looks amazing – especially compared to the old mess.
I’d honestly rather tweak code or do something creative than do boring busy business work (BBB) – but I understand those things have their place. That said – you’ll find if you work with me that I prefer to keep meetings short and to the point, brainstorm efficiently, and work with clear and defined goals. That way I can get back to the fun stuff. I can’t believe I’m an adult and this is the awesome job I get to have.