Born to a nomadic band of northerners, I was raised throughout various romantic sounding settings as Duluth, Grand Forks, Pembina and West Fargo. The mythical land of block heaters, ski-doos and arctic cats, 10,000 lakes and mosquitoes the size of birds instilled in me an incredible desire to be somewhere else. After arming myself with most* of a degree in Film and Literature from Moorhead State University** and 6 or so years of restaurant experience, I went south.

Well, more southeast… pulling a small U-Hall trailer, my lime green, 2 door hardtop ‘79 Lebaran sailed past the Mississippi, south of the Great Lakes, across the plains of Indiana to the Scioto River where I docked at Columbus, Ohio.  Settled in the land of the Buckeyes, I married a local girl and found a job at CompuServe.

Relying on my vast geek knowledge, anal organizational skills and youngest child desire to always get my way, I started a career in project management.  Throughout the mid-to-late ’90’s I managed projects ranging from “single-sign on” systems, billing projects to content management systems and consumer sites.  In ‘97, AOL acquired CompuServe*** and I decided to follow a different career path into information technology management.  As a project manager, a good portion of my time was spent as a business analyst type working with the business owner to help flesh out their requirements.  In order to really help with feasibility assessments, I spent a great deal of time shadowing architects and developers.  I sat in design discussions, code reviews, you name it.  I was the little kid following the IT folks around asking questions.  When they changed from ignorant to insightful and I found myself acting more manager to the developers than their actual managers, I realized I was falling into a new career.  Knowing my partial film degree would be of no help, I obtained a BS in Business Information Systems via the University of Phoenix.  (Oh, my wife and I also had 4 kids… it was a fun time)

Now, managing projects is NOT the same as managing people.  Just like great developers do not necessarily make good people managers, the same goes for project managers.  Luckily, I had some really good mentors during that time… really good people persons.  They coached me, suggested reading materials, training and provided excellent examples.  Luckily, I ran into a few challenging situations early on.  Yes, I said luckily.  You can’t learn how to manage if people and situations don’t require managing.  Throughout this time, we also pushed some really cool projects.  My team found ourselves working on consumer internet applications/sites ranging from search, discovery driven music and games portals, AOL Radio and AOL Video.  These were high performance applications with in depth infrastructure systems.  SOA, XML, ReST, Oracle, MySQL, Java, MicroFormats, streaming audio and video, Flash/Flex, Ajax… those sorts of things.  And I found myself responsible for a manager, 14 software engineers of various levels, an architect and individuals in other teams matrixed in.  When it came to an end, it really felt like leaving on top.

Now, I’m working on the next chapter…

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* 3 years of classes related to the majors, but neglected those pesty core classes universities expect everyone to get
** NOT the one in Kentucky.  That’s Morehead University.  You probably haven’t heard of the one I’m talking about.  It was, at the time, one of the only universities in the Midwest with a film department.
*** Technically at the time, it was stated as a merger where H&R Block, parent company of CompuServe, sold off  the Network division to one company and AOL took over the online service portion.  I’m not really sure how anyone could classify that a merger.