Sherrie Person

My success is contributed to being able to see the big picture, taking a step back, not being so focused on one task or one milestone, but being able to see a project from start to finish. I'm great at strategizing and just solutioning. I feel like I'm a little Olivia Pope-ish - it's like, any problem, I can solve it, or I can figure it out and try to get to a resolution. So I feel like I'm a fixer in general. I was also an athlete, so I'm just like, I have to win, so that means in the project sense, we have to finish on time, within budget, and within scope.

The best career advice I've received is from my current CIO, who says to be 100% honest and 100% kind. Because if you're just 100% honest and not kind, then you're just being a jerk or not being nice - you're just saying whatever, saying something true, but it could be hurtful. But if you're 100% kind, you might be getting pushed over and all that, so just finding the balance of being honest and kind, I think that that helps you go a long way.

Just do it. You can do it, believe in yourself, continue on, just take the steps, ask questions. The one thing that also helped me was just to go out of my comfort zone and ask somebody else for help. I'm normally just do a lot of things on my own, but you don't have to - the world is about community. Ask for help, because people want to help, and I think that that would be the best advice. Ask for help, don't try to do it on your own. Because you don't have to recreate the wheel, right? There's nothing new under the sun, so you don't have to try to struggle and figure it out. I mean, you have to do the work, but just ask for help.

The biggest challenge in my field is resources and personnel - not having enough. In my current role, I'm responsible for tons of projects in flight that are being slightly managed by the staff doing the work, but those get dropped because they have their actual jobs to do. So it's my responsibility to make sure that things are moving progressively and staying on task and within the budget. With Title III specifically, we have to make sure that we spend our budget within a particular time period before the grant cycle ends, so that is sometimes a challenge, trying to get all the money spent and the projects completed while people are doing other jobs. Before I got to Clark, there was no project management office, and so the last year and a half, I've been building the office from ground zero. A lot of stuff is coming at me, but I'm one person, and I need to build out my team.

Values that I believe in are being kind. I don't think that there's any reason to be nasty or ugly or mean to people, because honestly, you never know what people are going through. Being kind, being honest, having integrity, and persevering. Life is gonna come in all kinds of ways. It's okay to take a step back, but then get back up and keep going.