pmpmaker

I have spent over a decade managing enterprise transformation projects. The artifacts that kept getting used after closeout were never the status reports or the steering committee decks.

The pattern that kept running

They were the systems I built on the side. Every project I managed got provisioned with an MS Project Plan and a supporting SharePoint site. Being a Site Owner meant obsessing over how workspaces were designed. I explored JSON formatting in SharePoint lists. I started building in Power Automate. I built Microsoft Lists trackers that gave teams real-time visibility without adding a meeting.

Nobody put those in the charter. They just kept running.

That pattern showed up often enough that I stopped treating it as a side effect of the work and started treating it as the point.

By day: healthcare transformation

I am a Business Initiatives Consultant at UnityPoint Health, working inside the Transformation Management Office. Over the years I have led healthcare IT projects across clinical and digital domains: Epic EHR integrations with medical devices, virtual nursing and telehealth rollouts, and AI-powered patient monitoring.

I also managed a multi-year program to digitize the patient experience through the MyUnityPoint Patient Portal. Patients can now schedule appointments, complete pre-visit paperwork, sign documents electronically, make payments, and view test results and provider notes. A parallel project integrated online scheduling into the corporate provider directory so new patients can find and book with a provider directly.

Healthcare IT work requires constant translation between clinical needs and technical possibilities. My operational stack for making that happen is Microsoft 365: SharePoint, Power Automate, Power BI, Teams, Microsoft Lists, Planner, and increasingly Copilot.

Where AI actually fits

My path into citizen development became more formal when I joined the 5th cohort of Microsoft’s Power Up Program. Twelve weeks of guided learning and hands-on labs: App in a Day, Dashboard in a Day, and a capstone project built on Dataverse, Power Automate, Power BI, and Power Apps.

I hold the PMP, the Microsoft Power Platform Fundamentals certification (PL-900), and Microsoft Applied Skills in Power Apps and Power Automate. I also hold CPMAI, a credential for managing AI projects, and I stay active in PMI. I previously served as Director of Mentoring at the PMI Central Iowa Chapter. After completing Power Up, I joined PMI’s Co-Building program as a Volunteer SME for PMI Infinity. I entered prompts, evaluated outputs, and logged results in Smartsheet to provide feedback to the AI team before launch.

That work gave me a direct look at where conversational AI fits inside enterprise environments and where it does not. The line is blurrier than most vendor demos suggest. It pushed me to go further: from using Copilot, Claude, and Gemini to hosting models locally, starting with Llama 2 on my home PC. Building things breaks assumptions faster than reading about them.

The thread running through all of it is systems thinking: understanding how work flows, where it stalls, and what automation removes friction versus what automation creates new complexity. Those are not the same thing, and most implementations do not slow down long enough to check which one they are doing.

The homelab

Outside of work, I run a self-hosted homelab on a single Ubuntu 24.04 server. Everything routes securely through a Cloudflare Tunnel with zero exposed ports.

The stack includes Open WebUI connected to local Ollama models, n8n for workflow integration, and a suite of self-hosted services: Vikunja, Vaultwarden, and CouchDB for Obsidian LiveSync. I also run Home Assistant on a dedicated Dell Wyse thin client.

I test architecture patterns here before I recommend them anywhere else. When something breaks, I find out why. That is more useful than reading a white paper.

This site is where I document that work: the systems I build, the experiments I run, and what I learn when they break. If you are working through the same kind of problems, look around or get in touch.