Last week, I left the employ of BuildingGreen, LLC, a publisher that serves the green building sector, which I really, really didn't want to do. For the first time in fifteen years, I was laid off. Officially, the words were "tough financial situation," and I can't say more than that (believe me, I checked) at this time, including how many of us were told to hit the streets in various directions. The important part, I guess, is that the company lives on to serve its mission, "to facilitate transformation of the North American building industry into a force for local, regional and global environmental protection; for preservation and restoration of the natural environment; and for creation of healthy indoor environments—while promoting the well-being of the company and its employees, owners, and associates." Working for a mission-driven company like that was pretty challenging at times - but the mission itself was pretty handy in bringing conversations about product development into perspective, I have to say. I'm going to miss it all.
Since I was a remote worker, it happened by phone this past Wednesday. My last day was that Friday - I'm on severance right now and, well, looking for my next opportunity. I've talked to quite a few people with vastly different outlooks on the local economy (Buffalo, NY) and the marketability of my skills even outside of my region, as was the case with my last employer who is based in Vermont. It's a little unsettling to have a four-month old down the hall and few prospects that will keep a roof over his head post-severance, but I'm hoping that this will turn around shortly.
So: in the spirit of opening myself up to the Universe, below is a plain-English-but-with-acronyms, bulleted list of achievements and skills that make me valuable to a company.
- I worked remotely for seventeen months and travelled 10% (a few days a month, sometimes twice in one month) to Brattleboro, VT for meetings at BuildingGreen. From my home office, I ran new product development, did project management, held conference calls, stayed up for the odd late night support session, ran customer meetings, and used a TON of collaboration methods. It was way harder than I thought it was going to be, and even harder to stay connected with the people I *didn't* talk to every day. But I view the whole endeavor as a success in this regard - I now count some of these people I've been in the same room with a handful of times to be among my closest friends and colleagues. Takeaway: I work well remotely and am willing to travel if there's value in it.
- Just for context, go to leeduser.com, a site built in Drupal (PHP/MySQL) and devoted to helping LEED APs and other green building professionals get LEED certification for their building projects. I was in charge of its architecture and did project management to support its creation, in addition to custom module and theme development. The product manager is green- and techno-veteran Jim Newman and I regularly worked with him and other subject matter experts to refine our iterative requirements. I had a great internal dev team of Kelly Lucas (still at BuildingGreen) and Phil Scheffer (somewhere West of the Rockies right now...), as well as design comps and deliverables from Modo Design Group, initial theming by Lucidus (heavy work mostly by Eric London, now with CommonPlaces), and ubercart e-commerce implementation with Commerce Guys. It was a year of my life and there is some really magical custom development in there that draws together very, very large Panels pages - from a collection of many thousands of nodes - with multiple taxonomies and Views. This was all of my own design. (Sorry - had to get technical on that one.) Takeaways: I can manage both vendors and projects, am versed in both theoretical and practical information architecture, and am handy at Drupal development.
- I did "IT management" - performing and overseeing ongoing development - for a contract that BuildingGreen has with the United States Department of Energy on the High Performance Buildings Database (HPB), which has a single point of data collection and multiple "public faces" using ColdFusion and MSSQL. I had a great contractor resource at my disposal, as well as Michael Wentz (Case Studies Product Manager) to work through the business layers. Around the time we wrapped up a couple of major releases, it was time to kick off LEEDuser; from then on, this product was in maintenance mode for me except for C&A cost scoping and documentation. The last thing I turned out was an architectural recommendation to USDOE which, of course, I can't talk about here. Takeaways: I manage contract employees well, continually review delivered work for best practices, and write enterprise-grade documentation.
- When I was with Delaware North Companies (before starting my BuildingGreen position), I was split between (a) Oracle BI/ETL planning and development and (b) app development in C# .NET. On the BI side of things, I scoped Oracle licensing, architecture, and line of business requirements for a large project on the Parks side of things, and did smaller stuff for the Gaming silo. Man, was that fun stuff. On the C# .NET (programming) side, I did small apps for internal departments to help them obtain better performance metrics. Aside from these things, I chaired an HTNG working group, talked a lot of social media to whoever would listen, and helped out on other Applications Group projects. Takeaways: I have a competency in data warehousing, enjoy requirements gathering through solution delivery, and am constantly aware of the value proposition of my work.
That's only the last few years, but those items highlight what I think my strengths are. So, if you know anybody who needs these things in their business, send them this link: http://bit.ly/6qpIny.
Thanks and I'll see you around, Universe. Here's hoping this search is a short one.
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