Job Q&A
Ben Dickinson, General Manager
by Kendra Lott
[More Job Q&A's]

After completing a B.S. in pharmacy at University of Colorado Boulder and a doctorate in pharmacy (PharmD) at the University of Kentucky, Ben Dickinson began working as an editor in the publications department of the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP), a Washington, D.C.-based professional association for pharmacists. Ben’s skill in software projects soon became clear to his employers, who asked him to manage the association’s Web site. He did so for three years before going to work for HFD, a Web site design firm. HFD counts Howard Hughes Medical Institute, whose site won Popular Mechanics’ Top 50 Site award, among its many satisfied customers.

Monster.com: What prompted your decision to pursue a career in technology instead of in pharmacy?

Ben Dickinson: While my education was certainly beneficial to the work I was doing at ASHP, I wasn’t practicing pharmacy as a science. At some point I had to decide to go back to pharmacy or leave it behind, and I chose to move on because the Web side of what I was doing was more fun and more creative -- it’s exciting.

Mc: How did you land your current job?

BD: It was a matter of good timing for both my employer and myself. When I met Jim Holloway, the president of HFD, he had been sole proprietor of the business for 8 years. He’s a photographer who went from putting photos on the Web to building Web sites. I wanted to do something on my own, but I needed a designer. Jim invited me to work with him because he would never have been able to handle the demands of his favorite clients and still build the business.

Mc: How is HFD structured now?

BD: We hired a technology officer and someone with a marketing background and a mild tech base, and Jim provides creative direction and design work. We still hire a lot of freelancers for tech work.

Mc: What kind of work are you doing?

BD: I do the books, write proposals, manage operations and business development, and sometimes do HTML. I also handle project management.

Mc: What does that mean, exactly?

BD: I’m the liaison between the client and the creative team. This means that when a client comes to us with a concept, I oversee the process of designing the pages and the applications. As an independent and creative ship, we see at as our job to educate our clients on the best way to do something. Sometimes they forget that it would be of higher quality if we took more time in order to do it a certain way.

Mc: What’s the most challenging aspect of your work?

BD: Finding structure and putting timelines on creative people so that I can make plans around their work. The techs create very elegant ways of making things run, and I have to create enough structure so that things move forward, but not so much that they get overwhelmed and feel that they can’t function creatively. I think in a very linear way, and it took me a while to learn not to panic when a tech would say that they were done, and I would ask "Where is it?" and they would reply, "I haven’t built it yet." I’ve come to realize that the creating is often just a mechanical process -- it’s the concept behind it that’s often most time-consuming.

Mc: What advice would you offer someone looking to get into project management?

BD: Give it time and get to know the people you work with. I read books on the psychology behind project management, such as learning to spot introverts and extroverts and how to make [the] best use of their talents.

Mc: Do you have any formal technical background?

BD: No, but the editorial work I’ve done has helped, because a lot of times new clients have too much content and you have to narrow it down. Often people organize their content based on administrative function, and we have to convince them that people will find their site more useful without those layers. There’s a whole new set of rules for the Web.

Mc: How do you stay current?

BD: I keep up with new trends for Web site design by looking at other sites. However, clients often feel that their users are behind the curve browser-wise, so they don’t always want the newest thing.