Digital Media Services

Situation

I helped a Boeing executive with communication and change management support for an initiative called Second Century Enterprise Systems. What started as a printed booklet organically grew into videos, podcasts, graphics, websites, and even workshops for teams all over the company. The challenge I had was growing the team, expanding to multiple sites for better coverage, and ensuring my Boeing teammates were being challenged while doing great work together.

Approach

I started off as a story guy, and like many creative types at Boeing, was a bit of a lone wolf “freelancer” type. But, to do the quantity and quality of work I wanted, I knew I was going need to rely on writers, editors, and designers far better than me. I recruited other passionate communicators and designers, curating and developing training content to help people build their creative skills. I’m kind of obsessed with “making maps” so I built documentation for pretty much anything we did. If something was going to be repeated, it was written down. I’ve always approached work (and life) iteratively. Having processes documented, checklists, and templates gives me something to revisit later and tweak.

Being a part of the IT organization, we were expected to use IT project management tools like Jira and later on Team Foundation Server to track our backlog and assign work as user stories. We developed templates for our work so we could estimate costs and schedules to our clients with accuracy. It also helped us build roles on the team and easily hand off work, which made it possible for us to scale our operations. The projects just kept coming, and our team organically grew from 2 to 8 people in three separate locations.

Outcome

What started as a project to create an executive presentation turned into hundreds of video, infographic, podcast, and website projects over a span of five years, gaining most of those projects through client referrals. We were eventually acquired by the Office of the CIO to work with multiple product teams to promote their work and reach their stakeholders. I also had a chance to help people develop their creative careers, building confidence in their skills and pushing them to explore unfamiliar disciplines and styles. Basically, this was a dream role for me at Boeing and I’m super grateful I had the chance to work with the people I did.

Responsibilities

Creative Services Management, Creative Direction, Project Management, Design

Technology Used

Adobe Creative Cloud, Maxon Cinema 4D, Redshift, Microsoft Visual Studio, OneNote, JIRA, Team Foundation Server, WebEx Teams, Google Analytics