Steve seems to be on the road to a world record for most bones broken! Highlights include his leg, arm, wrist, seven vertebrae, three ribs and his skull – and he once walked away from being hit by a train. “The memories of those injuries are reasons to remember that even when I’m grateful, I’m never grateful enough.”
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Steve rejects authority.
At first glance most people would not imagine Steve as a radical of any kind, but he is a self-proclaimed objector to authority for the sake of authority. In fact, this attitude is what drove him toward the role he is in today. “I hated the ‘do it because I said so’ way of thinking,” says Steve. “One of the reasons I became a project manager is because I didn’t want to be ‘project managed’ – at least not in the way it was being done then.”
Steve’s feelings on authority certainly have not affected his ability to be a team player. As Merge’s Project Management Lead he works on more teams within the agency than almost anyone else. His role is to help facilitate and direct the progress of work during large projects. His goal is to make our work at Merge reliable and consistent and to manage client - as well as agency - expectations. He has even established Merge’s Project Management Office (PMO) and its methodology for managing and executing all of our projects, large and small. This system aids in the smooth transition from creative brief to design work to final deliverable and documents each milestone, while predicting and diffusing issues and risks associated with each project.
Steve’s alternative to the ‘because I said so’ mantra is his staunch devotion to pragmatism. He elaborates, “We want to be both effective and efficient. Sometimes the way we will do things won’t feel like it’s the easiest or necessarily the fastest, but it pays to do those things that are going to help the project succeed. If there’s some process or template that isn’t needed, by all means, dispense with it, as long as we’re still protecting the project in doing so.”
Large-scale projects often take twists and turns that could potentially confuse and frustrate both client and agency, but having a strong system in place to direct them and to predict issues and risks keeps everyone pointed toward the same goal and comfortable with the process. Steve comments, “No project will ever run perfectly smoothly from start to finish, and with no bumps the process isn’t nearly as fun. My job is to set up the track for the roller coaster to ride on and stay on.”
Steve’s outlook on project management is largely self-learned. He earned his Project Management Professional (PMP) certification but admits that titles and certifications are really not what it’s “all about.” According to Steve, education is no substitute for old-fashioned experience. “The certification implies a certain level of experience and depth and breadth of a toolset, and it ought to increase a client’s confidence in our abilities, but it doesn’t determine your worth.” Much of his project management experience was at IXL where he managed a 35-person project team with a $7.5 million budget. He has also managed projects for clients such as Coca-Cola, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, PBS, Deutsche Bank, Turner, BellSouth and most recently here at Merge, Qwest.
