About
About Me: Wesley Erickson
I’m a Business Initiatives Consultant in the Transformation Management Office at UnityPoint Health, where I’ve spent over a decade helping healthcare teams navigate complex systems, align stakeholders, and execute meaningful organizational change. While I am PMP-certified and active in PMI, my real drive comes from understanding how the pieces connect — and building something better once I do.
I consider myself a Maker and a systems thinker — someone who uses a project management foundation not just to manage work, but to see the interconnections others miss and build solutions that bridge the gap between high-level strategy and ground-level execution. The most effective solutions are not handed down from the top; they are built by the people closest to the problem, with a willingness to challenge assumptions, experiment, and iterate until the solution fits the need.
The Day Job
My career at UnityPoint Health has involved navigating complex challenges across both ambulatory and inpatient environments. I have led numerous Epic implementations and optimizations, ranging from high-level digital transformations to deep clinical rollouts. In the ambulatory space, I managed projects to digitize the patient experience by standing up systems for self-scheduling, pre-visit paperwork, and digital check-in.
My inpatient experience is equally broad, covering a variety of clinical workflows and system enhancements. As one example, I led an Epic Anesthesia rollout that required deploying middleware and updated software to move providers from paper-based records to fully electronic intraoperative documentation. Throughout my tenure, I have managed high-stakes regulatory projects and built process frameworks that teams continue to use long after a project closes. The common thread is pattern recognition — understanding how a change in one area ripples through the rest of the system, and designing for that from the start.
Through that work, I discovered that I was most energized when I could see the whole picture — the people, the tools, the workflows — and then build the connective tissue between them. That realization shaped everything that followed. Today, my day-to-day work lives inside Microsoft 365. I build collaborative SharePoint sites that give teams a place to actually work together, not just store things. I design Microsoft Lists that make ownership visible and build out Microsoft Teams environments that bring structure to how teams communicate. I use Power Automate to connect the gaps between tools that were never designed to talk to each other. I also create documentation that actually gets used, including process guides, how-to resources, and governance frameworks teams can pick up and run with.
Beyond my primary role, I am an active PMI member and former volunteer director for the PMI Central Iowa Chapter. I also had the privilege of helping co-build PMI Infinity, an AI-powered assistant designed for project professionals. It remains one of the more interesting intersections of governance and emerging technology I have worked on. My approach is simple: governance should enable building, not slow it down.
The Lab
Outside of work, I experiment. I run a home lab on a mini PC running Ubuntu and Docker with a growing stack of self-hosted services and occasionally a container that refuses to behave. My setup includes Home Assistant for local automation and local LLMs using Ollama to better understand how these models actually work. I also build automation flows in n8n. I self-host because knowing how infrastructure fails is the most honest way to understand it. In a world where everyone has access to the same AI tools, the differentiator is not the tool — it is the ability to see how the pieces fit together and build systems around them that actually solve problems.
PMPMaker.com is where those experiments get documented. I share the wins, the mistakes, and the lessons that eventually make their way back into my professional work. The habit of documenting things clearly at work and the habit of publishing things publicly here are not that different. Both exist to make knowledge useful beyond the moment it was created.
Outside the Screen
I coach Varsity Boys Soccer at Dowling Catholic High School, my alma mater. Having played competitively through college, the sport has always been part of how I think about teamwork, development, and what it actually takes to perform under pressure. Coaching reinforces a lot of what I see in transformation work. Clear roles, communication, and process all matter, but development and ownership matter even more. You cannot simply hand someone a playbook and expect results.
At home in Des Moines, my wife and two young kids keep life grounded and entertaining. They serve as a daily reminder that not everything can be optimized. That is probably for the best.
The opinions on this site are my own and do not reflect those of my employer.
Want to connect? Head to the Contact page.