About
I didn’t set out to become a workflow designer. I set out to solve one problem: faculty couldn’t agree on how to talk about quality teaching using Bloom’s taxonomy, so I built our own shared language instead, a learning skills framework that gave a whole team the same vocabulary for the same decisions. That project taught me something about myself. I don’t just design the thing in front of me. I design the system that makes the next ten things easier.
That instinct kept showing up. I built a framework for turning isolated student assignments into a living, program-wide body of work, so what a student created in their first year became something an upperclassman could build on, edit, and eventually publish. I redesigned a professional development program that had run for years without anyone finishing it, not because people weren’t capable, but because the path to completion was scattered across sessions with no single place to track progress. One shared file fixed what years of effort hadn’t.
A facilitator running a DACUM analysis once stopped mid-session, looked at how I was mapping the process, and asked if I’d ever consider doing this kind of work full time. I hadn’t thought of it as a skill yet. It just felt like paying attention. Training as a certified Workflow Specialist gave that instinct a name and a method: how to map a process that lives in someone’s head, how to find the handoff where things quietly go wrong, and how to bring a team along with a new way of working instead of just announcing it to them.
That’s the part most people skip. A workflow can be technically correct and still fail, because the people inside it never bought in. I’ve spent years in the space between the system and the person using it, and I’ve learned that the real work isn’t the flowchart. It’s the conversation before the flowchart.
Why the tortoise
You’ll notice a tortoise here and there as you move through this site. I chose it on purpose. It isn’t a pet, my own animals at home are rabbits, but the tortoise fit something the rabbit never could: a process that’s deliberate, doesn’t waste energy on the wrong moves, and gets to a result that’s actually usable, not just fast. I look at this work like that, looking for the puzzle pieces of a workflow’s bottlenecks, untangling the handoffs, and building something a team can still run cleanly long after I’ve handed it off. As this site grows, you’ll see the tortoise rendered into ironwork patterns and more custom touches throughout, the same way good design rewards a second look.
I love this work because every organization has a version of this puzzle sitting somewhere, half-solved, waiting for someone who notices it.
Would having someone like me in your corner change anything for you?
Channell Walker 