Thursday, August 26, 2010

The Professional Resume

If you're a real professional, you will see your work as a career. I despise the hucksters who talk about "building the personal brand," but an important part of building a career is keeping a professional record of what you do. Such a record describes skills, knowledge, and experience in such a way that other professionals can find within it the credentials of competency. This is the official resume. For professionals who work on projects, the resume should describe them in three parts: the client, the project, and your personal deliverables.

Here is an example.

So-and-so is a Canadian energy company focused on exploration and development of natural gas. They have had an enterprise license for over 4,000 seats of Livelink in two instances for years, but use it unevenly: for example, land records are managed well, but other areas are just dumping grounds. Interestingly, SharePoint is officially forbidden.

This project was designed to increase usage and improve access to specific document collections by building a friendly and interactive search screen. It was written using WebReports, not OScript, and subsumed standard Livelink functionality such as a custom category, LiveReports, and forms. The project lasted from March to August, 2010.

Mr. Such-and-Such was the BA and PM for this project. Working from incomplete requirements, he wrote the project charter, AFE, CIS model, UI, test scripts, user documentation, system documentation, and lessons learned. He maintained status reports and a change order. He wrote one WebReport, communicated detailed requirements to the remote development team for many others, and installed the application in multiple environments.