One of my colleagues at Perficient was recognized today by our partner, Sitecore. Jamie Stump, a developer, consultant and blogger here, was named a 2013 Sitecore Most Valuable Professional (MVP).
Jamie Stump, a 2013 Sitecore MVP
Sitecore describes the MVP program in this way:
The Sitecore MVP program recognizes individuals for their active participation within the Sitecore community, sharing knowledge and expertise with other Sitecore partners and customers.
But Jamie is also an MVP of sorts here at Perficient for a lot of other reasons. Jamie is not only actively participating in online communities – our internal collaborative sites, our public-facing Microsoft technologies blog, our Portals blog, Sitecore’s blog, and on Twitter (@JStump29) – but he is also a really good developer, and works extremely well with the business side to produce an impressive end result, on time and within scope.
How do I know this? I worked with Jamie directly for roughly 10 months on redesigning our corporate site and migrating all of our site’s content to Sitecore. Jamie and I worked with a small team, including one project manager and another great Sitecore developer of ours, Candace Hoeksema. I still work directly with Jamie and Candace on new development work on our site. So I have had a lot of direct interaction with Jamie. I’ve also worked with other .NET developers in many jobs in my past, so I have some perspective on just what makes Jamie so deserving of the MVP designation.
I’ll describe two of the many important reasons that I consider Jamie to be an MVP at Perficient too, based on my own experience working with him.
Working with the “client”
I have worked with developers in both a waterfall development method and an agile development method in the past. I really prefer agile, as it allows us to see working functionality progressively over time, and often daily. It also means that I discovered new things I wanted all the time. Most developers do not enjoy working with a business analyst or product owner who changes requirements all the time or one who is constantly adding to the list of requested features and functionality. It can lead to pretty bad scope creep.
I’ve had a lot of developers tell me “Oh, that’s going to take a really long time!” or react with their own opinions about what I was requesting with comments like “Why would you want that feature?” or “I don’t think we can do that. You don’t really need that.”
Jamie never got frustrated with me, and most importantly, as the “client” in this project, I noticed that Jamie never said “no.” He never made me feel like what I was requesting would be “too difficult” or unreasonable. Like any great developer, Jamie always thought about the “how” and not the “if.”
Jamie was great about quickly estimating the amount of time it would take to add in new features that I added on, and really figured out clever ways to give me multiple choices for how to make things happen in shorter periods of time. He would also analyze Sitecore’s out-of-the-box features and capabilities and was frequently sharing with me what I “could have” or “might want to know about.”
We worked so collaboratively on the process, and on every feature Jamie was building for us, that the entire process of the redesign felt hassle-free and seamless to me. In addition, Jamie got excited about new features, and his positive attitude about the entire project was contagious. It helped the whole team feel like what we were building was really cool. That’s how I want our clients at Perficient to feel when they work with us, so it was really rewarding to be able to experience that myself.
Building our knowledge of Sitecore together
When I began working with Jamie, it was my first exposure to Sitecore as a CMS. We evaluated multiple CMS options, which Jamie and I will talk more about in our webinar about Sitecore on April 18th, but we selected Sitecore for a lot of great reasons. I took advantage of Sitecore’s online training option for an introduction to the platform for content managers, and then I went to a training in Dallas on use of the digital marketing tools.
Sitecore is pretty intuitive for a content manager, but it’s also a robust system with a lot of capabilities. We put in quite a lot of custom features using Jamie and Candace’s development expertise as we were working to move our site to Sitecore, so working with a Sitecore “expert” like Jamie was critical for us. Jamie knew Sitecore pretty well, but he wasn’t afraid to tell me when he didn’t know something. He was also extremely reassuring when he’d tell me “I don’t know, but I”ll find out.” And Jamie works quickly. He’d investigate what he needed to learn using Sitecore’s developer knowledgebase and forums, and he’d have an answer for me within 24 hours, often within just a few hours. All the while, Jamie was building his own understanding of the platform and then either storing what he’d learned in our own internal collaborative wikis for our other Sitecore developers’ benefit, or emailing it out to those who would like to know. Now he blogs about new things he learns about Sitecore.
It’s extremely reassuring to work with a developer who isn’t afraid to tell you when he doesn’t know how to do something, but you’re confident he’ll learn how quickly and efficiently.
Jamie also scheduled frequent “training” calls with me and our other content managers to walk us through specifically where he put something in the back-end of Sitecore, and how we, as users, would use that functionality to produce the desired result on the front-end.
Overall, I’m pretty proud that one of our great co-workers has been recognized by our partner, Sitecore, for being really good at what he does and being so willing to share that knowledge with others. I hope that more and more of Perficient’s clients get to experience not only the great Sitecore end-product that Jamie can produce for their content management needs, but also that they’ll get to experience what I did – what it feels like to have a true “partner” in the process – someone they trust, someone who understands what they’re requesting, gets jazzed about what he’s building, and works hard and fast to get it done.
Congratulations, Jamie. Well deserved.
Considering Sitecore?
You can hear Jamie and I talk more about our experience moving Perficient.com to Sitecore in our free webinar Learn How Perficient Increased Website Engagement By Implementing Sitecore CMS
