I thought this might be an interesting topic to write about.  Really…how many of us said that we wanted to be Project Managers when we grew up?  I was going to be a baseball player, then a racecar driver, then a lawyer and when I first entered college – a pharmacist, believe it or not.  I switched to the MIS track and came out of college as an application developer.

 

 

 

 

The Beginning

 

 

 

 

My first 3 or 4 years were spent coding in COBOL and writing proposals for long-term government contracts.  After one of those contract wins, I took the role of Configuration Manager on the project.  I’m really dating myself here, but in the early 1990’s I switched to Project/Program Management when I was offered a key position on one of the contracts we were performing on with the US Department of Education.

 

 

 

 

Couldn’t Code Forever

 

 

 

 

I recognized early on that I wasn’t truly interested in coding forever.  I needed the interaction with the customer and to lead projects and oversee tasks from beginning to end from a higher viewpoint.  I jumped at the chance to become the Configuration Manager on the Guaranteed Student Loan project we had just won.  I managed all change control for the project including leading the formal Change Control Board and managing a small staff.  Switching to the Project Management path came a couple of years later but was still more like Program Management than Project Management because it was really overseeing on-going activity on a five-year government contract, not running multiple engagements from beginning to end like I think of more traditional project management roles.

 

 

 

 

My first taste of performing the type of project management that I perform now came in 1998 when I went to work for Rockwell Collins handling their internal internet, intranet and extranet projects and leading a small team of web developers on these efforts.  I thoroughly enjoyed the challenge of overseeing those projects from beginning to end – even handling the ‘sales’ side on these internal projects and sometimes managing up to 10-15 live projects at a time.

 

 

 

 

Except for a stint as a Corporate Applications Development Manager for a large gaming/hospitality entity here in Las Vegas, I’ve pretty much stayed in the project management track handling usually 4-6 projects at a time.  I like the challenge, I love the customer handling and interaction, as well as the oversight responsibilities for the delivery team.  I’ve found my niche…I’ve found what drives me.  When I need a taste of innovation, I’ve been able to get that from consulting work with smaller organizations helping them either organize their PM practices, incorporate new or better practices, fix problems they are having with customers and solutions and in some cases just help them figure out a better way to do business.  These activities don’t really follow a PM path so they tend to feed the entrepreneurial spirit in me.

 

 

 

 

Early Mentor

 

 

 

 

My real career turn from developer toward project manager came from my early mentor/manager who discussed my career path at great lengths with me on many occasions.  From my answers could tell that I was aligning more with a project management interest.  He helped guide me in that direction and helped me to find roles on proposals and other projects that would get me the experience and the foot-in-the-door situation to be able to move into those types of roles.

 

 

 

 

Your Feedback

 

 

 

 

That’s my story in a nutshell.  I welcome any questions you might have and I’d also like to hear how some of you became project managers.  I still haven’t had any of my kids say they want to be a project manager when they grow up so I know it’s a discipline you really just ‘happen into’ more than choose, for the most part.  Go ahead...send me your stories.