Xroads Project Manager

As Project Manager of the Xroads site, my duties proved to be two-fold. First, I was a coordinator. It was necessary to bring together some of the prior term's projects - the original Yellow Pages upgrades and Trachtenberg projects - and integrate them into the Xroads site. Secondly, I considered improvements to the site. This manifested itself in the reworking of the Incorporation of America Table of Contents. I looked over all the projects on the Xroads site, and determined which might be useful to a reader of Trachtenberg as hypertext extension.

Overall, the Project Manager needs to be comfortable coercing her peers and even threatening with violence. The PM will need a clear understanding of the Xroads' goals and resources. He or she should unite this knowledge with some vision as to how to improve the site for users.

Project Manager Self-Assessment

As Project Manager of the Xroads site I coordinated the collection and implementation of Yellow Pages upgrades and new Trachtenberg projects. This was done quickly and without much ado.

I also considered how we might improve the Xroads site for user navigation, as I felt and feel that there are many resources that are hidden and virtually inaccessible. At Alan's suggestion, we limited the focus of such improvements to the Incorporation of America site. I scoured the Xroads site for existing projects pertinent to Trachtenberg's text. I then redesigned the Table of Contents to include these sites with the chapters they illuminated. In doing so, I think we both improved the Incorporation site, and made use of some latent resources.

Overall, however, I feel unsatisfied with this as the only real progress on the Xroads site. I think I was simply a victim of limited time, rather than diminished enthusiasm or vision. I think the navigational improvements we made with the Trachtenberg site should be applied more widely to the rest of the site, hopefully leading to a universal site index. The impending site makeover should facilitate this sort of universal organization.