Helen the Hub

ImageHelenHub

Helen is one of the founding members of UOFA and is 1 of 5 members of the management group that effectively run the company. She is however, not responsible for the long-term strategic thinking of the company, although she participates heavily in those discussions. Instead Helen is the company's project manager. She is responsible for project roadmaps and schedule, gathering and defining requirements and documentation.

She does not interface with the company's investors and potential business partners very much other than to give project updates and to present and field questions about the roadmap.

Helen is 36 years-old, married with 2 year-old twin boys. She is physically active, goes to the gum regularly and practices Yoga. She works hard at maintaining a healthy work-life balance, but is committed to her work and career.

She spends her whole day with her laptop, half of it in meetings. She also uses a legal pad to take notes and capture ideas and questions that pop into her head or that members of her team need answers to.

Due to her unique position: down in the trenches with the individual contributors, yet a focal point of intra-communication within the team, Helen is the first responder when it comes to identifying logistical and/or structure problems within the team that need to be addressed. Someone has the wrong role and needs to be moved to a different part of the team. An area of the project is being neglected and someone new needs to be hired, etc.

Helen spends a lot of time communicating with the various members of her team via email, framing discussions, asking questions, following up with summaries and decisions. She schedules 1:1 weekly meetings with every individual contributor on her team as well as group meetings to work through specific issues, review proposals and share status on progress.

In her 1:1 meetings, Helen reviews the individual contributor's task list with them, making sure the lists are up to date, flagging open issues that need follow-up, (re)prioritizing tasks, trying to figure out if certain issues need to be discussed with more people in the room.

Helen also prepares regular project summaries and status reports to the management group.

In order to do her job effectively, Helen relies heavily on Bart, the Busy Body / Coordinator and even sometimes Ivan, the Individual Contributor to help her pull the content of her communications together.

Helen has a PC desktop at work and a Thinkpad laptop which she carries between home and work. She has an old PC desktop at home that she doesn't really use anymore. She also has a SmartPhone^?, which she's been meaning to use for email and calendaring. But thus far, she's only managed to set up the contacts management part of it.

-- PriscillaChung - 23 Sep 2006