A Tale of 2 PM Careers

Following 20 years at a large Canadian telecommunications firm, Bruce established the project management consulting firm Solutions Management Inc (SMI). Since 1999, he has provided contract project/program management services, been a source for project management support personnel and created/delivered courses to over 7,000 participants in Canada, the United States and England.

  Career Development   New Practitioners  

This real-life story starts a longer time ago than I normally admit (it was 30 years ago!). It involves two very different project managers. We will call the first one, well…me. The other will be called Frank for purposes of the story.

Long ago, in a not-so-distant land…
Frank and I were both what are now called subject matter experts. We were unionized technicians who had great jobs fixing problems in the early years of data communications. We sat in our downtown offices and worked with people across North America, fixing problems for customers using high-speed circuits (that was 56 kilobits per second in those days). After a few years, it was time to look for new opportunities.

If you commit, we will commit
The great thing about some big companies is it’s possible to have very different careers all inside one very long career. I was promoted to manage a team of technicians doing the work I used to do, and Frank was temporarily promoted to assist in a major project serving a major automotive company.

After a few short years, we both jumped into the world of project management. The profession was still new [we’re talking about A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide)—Second Edition days] and the role really involved simply making sure services were provided on time to our biggest customers.

After a …

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