From Project Manager to Maker

Why I’m Starting PMPMaker.com

For more than a decade, I’ve worked in enterprise transformation at UnityPoint Health. I’ve managed projects to digitize the patient experience, helping build the systems that let patients self-schedule appointments, complete pre-visit paperwork, and show up to their care already checked in. I’ve led Epic module implementations, including an Epic Anesthesia rollout that required deploying middleware and an updated Epic solution to move providers from paper-based documentation to fully electronic intraoperative records. I’ve managed regulatory and compliance projects where the margin for error is effectively zero. I’ve built project management templates and process frameworks that teams still use long after the project closes.

At some point, though, I started noticing something about myself.

I wasn’t most energized by tracking progress. I was energized by building the system that made progress possible in the first place. The templates I was creating, the workflows I was designing, the processes I was standing up — that’s where I came alive. It wasn’t just project management. It was making things.

That realization is what eventually led to PMPMaker.com.

I’ve always cared about the how. Not just what we’re trying to achieve, but how it actually gets built. How workflows connect. How data flows through a process. How a well-placed automation quietly removes friction that a dozen people had just accepted as normal. That’s where the real leverage lives, and that’s what this site is about.

By Day

Today, my work lives inside Microsoft 365. I build collaborative SharePoint sites that give teams a place to actually work together. I design Microsoft Lists that drive accountability without adding overhead. I build out Microsoft Teams environments that bring structure to how teams communicate and collaborate. I use Power Automate to connect systems and eliminate the manual handoffs that quietly drain team energy. And I create documentation that actually gets used: process guides, how-to resources, and governance frameworks that teams can pick up and run with.

I’ve been PMP certified since 2020, I’m active in PMI, and I had the opportunity to help co-build PMI Infinity, an AI assistant built specifically for project professionals. My foundation is rooted in structure and disciplined execution.

But structure alone doesn’t build anything. You still need someone willing to get their hands dirty.

By Night

When work ends, the experimentation begins.

At home, I run a small lab on a mini PC, mostly Ubuntu, mostly Docker, occasionally held together by stubbornness and good logging. I run local LLMs with Ollama to understand what these models actually do under the hood. I build automation workflows in n8n that let me connect things that weren’t designed to talk to each other. I self-host services because understanding how something breaks is the fastest way to understand how it works.

Some projects land cleanly. Others break in interesting ways. All of them teach me something I can eventually bring back to the day job.

Why Document This Publicly

Writing forces me to be precise. Publishing holds me to it. Sharing makes it useful to someone else.

This site isn’t a highlight reel. It’s a working notebook, a place where I document what I’m building, what broke, what I rebuilt, and why. It’s a long-term asset I own and control, separate from any platform that might change its algorithm next quarter.

If you’re a project professional who wants to automate more and manage less, a consultant trying to bring more structure to your own work, or just someone curious about local AI and self-hosting, you’re in the right place.

This is where structure meets experimentation. Let’s build something that actually works.