Arthur McLean

Background

Originally the campaign was using a company called Tokoni to handle all their web site needs. This included web design and coding, content management, writers, and a videographer. I was hired by Tokoni as a contractor during this period to assist with web development. Tokoni had a social networking site prior to the campaign, and made a copy of that site for the campaign to use, and then began making customizations as needed.

During the course of the campaign there was an amicable parting of the ways with Tokoni. The campaign saw significant benefits for managing the IT themselves, and had grown to the point where they were capable of doing so. All the contractors hired by Tokoni became employees of the campaign.

I had previous management experience and was asked to take over the leadership role for the development side of the web site. The amazing and talented Alexa Andrews was able to coordinate the efforts of development, design, content writers and editors, the videographer, and social media managers (including a number of staff that were constantly on the road following the candidate or the opponent).

Challenge

The Director of Engineering position was 90% coding and 50% management. Web development duties actually expanded from the amount of work I was doing as a contractor. In addition, I was responsible for hiring and managing two other developers, prioritizing and coordinating their efforts, coordinating and ensuring the site hosting, and integrating with several third party vendors.

Development on a campaign has to be extremely agile as priorities can shift during the course of a single day. There is one unmovable deadline at which point every possible effort to communicate the candidate's message and register voters has to be achieved. Along the way there are thousands of smaller deliverables which are all given deadlines that would seem completely unrealistic in any normal working environment.

Just like NASA, failure is not an option.

Solution

I was extremely lucky in my hiring. Christian Serna and Blake Gardner were brilliant and hard working developers that I could rely on completely. They needed no management. They were collaborators in every step of the process, and I would take any chance I could to work with either of them again.

The rest of the Meg Whitman Web Team was fantastic as well. Everyone gave 110%. I am still amazed at how different of an experience the campaign was from a normal work environment. I don't think anyone was there to just do a 9 to 5 job. The campaign was a crusade, and it is awe inspiring to be part of such an environment.

I instituted daily meetings for the Web Team that were conducted over Skype so that all team members could dial in from wherever they were. Every day we monitored progress, checked for road blocks, and reevaluated priorities to maximize the team's effectiveness.

My coding efforts included building out new sections of the web site, creating issue-focused "microsites" (this is where the campaign put it's negative messaging), building Facebook widgets, rewiring the site to support multiple languages (via Motion Point's technology), integrating with with a data vendor (PDI) to collect and coordinate subscriber information and provide voter registration data, and slowly convert the site from a social networking platform to a more traditional CMS (the campaign found that reporters and site visitors were mistaking user generated content for campaign generated content, so efforts were made to move the social aspects of the site to Facebook, Twitter, and Ning, and make the messaging on the web site a tightly controlled process).