We are excited to announce a new addition to the Web Communications family (opens new window). Rommel is no stranger to the Marketing Department or the university. He's actually worked in Marketing since 2003 in various positions and even has his own t-shirt (opens new window).

Project management

He is coming in to wrangle all the work we do and bring some order to this place. The Web department has never had an official project manager, we all shared the responsibility with the assistance of tools like Basecamp (opens new window). That has worked well for some time, six years to be exact, and has forced us to be in constant communication with each other. But in the last few years the overhead of managing projects plus doing everyone's full time job has really impacted the speed of our work. Rommel will be responsible for prioritizing all work assigned to the Web staff. This will let the designers design, developers program and the writers write. He will also be in all intake meetings and be the switchboard operator for our Web Inbox.

Social Media

As if project management wasn't enough we are also going to task Rommel with being the official social media voice for the university and oversee our various communities. Since joining Twitter in January 2008 (opens new window) we have begun a journey of interacting on behalf of the university. Since then we have kept our focus small and manageable. This is another situation where multiple people shared the responsibility. Like project management it forced us to collaborate a lot but over time that overhead has started to slow down our innovation. Having a single person all the messages flow through will not only add consistency of voice but also an effective use of each medium. Rommel has a personality that will naturally resonate with the communities he will be managing.

A more structured process

Lastly, Rommel will be responsible for documenting our procedures, tools, and workflow. This all has been kept in various places over time but his organization skills will ensure it's centralized and everyone, (ourselves and our clients), are on the same page.

If you work with us now or plan to in the future you'll be sure to talk to Rommel at some point. Give him a Wayne State welcome. 😃