pmStudent

The first question I ask of students when I do career coaching is whether or not this is even the right choice for you.

Here is a primary consideration if you are considering a career switch into project management.

Individual Contributor?

In what role do you get the majority of your satisfaction?  Contributing directly in an individual role or by leading others who are contributing directly?

Make no mistake, the project management role is about facilitating the real work that is producing a new product or service.  When I point to the result of something my project teams have produced, I say "this is what my team did", not "this is what I did."  I guided my teams to create the product, I didn't create it myself.

If you are someone who derives a ton of personal satisfaction from how well you personally created something, the individual contributor role is probably for you.  If you want to be a manager, project or otherwise, then you need to be able to derive your personal satisfaction from working with people and their accomplishments.

The Goal:  Love What You Do

Have you ever had a manager (project or otherwise) who just didn't seem like they loved what they do?

Of course, we all have!

If you do not have a passion for working with people and deriving your satisfaction through them, you probably should not be a manager of any kind.  You'll end up being on the extreme:  a micromanager or an apathetic manager.

Now, an ex-programmer who is now a manager but still loves to program is not necessarily a bad thing.  As long as they view the objective of their management role and how to derive satisfaction from it appropriately, this is fine.

It becomes a problem when they want to write big chunks of applications themselves because "no one else can do it like I can." and so forth.  Or in some cases, the job becomes a meaningless cycle of paperwork because they just don't get jazzed by developing people, enabling team communication, or removing obstacles to help their teams succeed.

Do you have the DNA of a project manager, or an individual contributor?  Neither is better or worse, they are just different.

Share this with your network

Sometimes, we equate things that don't really mean the same thing.  Competence requires experience, but experience does not equate to competence.  I can infer experience from observing competence....but I can not accurately infer competence from a list of positions you've held.

Experienced ≠ Competent

We fall prey to common cognitive biases which lead us to believe that if someone is experienced, they are therefore competent.  It can trip us up when hiring for our teams.

Another aspect of this, and the more pernicious one, is that new professionals may lead themselves to believe that once they have some experience under their belt they will have 'made it'.  Complacency can set in after you've landed a job for instance, because you've tricked yourself into believing that simply holding that position makes you more valuable.

Certifications and Degrees ≠ Competence

The same goes for certifications and degrees.  Many people believe that holding a particular credential implies a level of competence.  Unless the credential is formulated specifically to assess competence, no such correlation is warranted however.  Organizations fall prey by hiring people and screening them on the basis of particular certifications or degrees.  Individuals fall prey by thinking they will have 'made it' once they get a slip of paper certifying them as 'master of the universe'.

Strive for Competence

Do not go after experience or certification as your primary goal.  They will come as a result of your journey towards competence.  

If you make experience, certification or degrees your primary goals, you run the risk of gaining those primary goals without acheiving a true level of competence for yourself.  These window dressings and indications of possible competence should only come about as a result of your journey towards something substantive; real competence.

It doesn't matter if you had the right answer or not; what matters is that you understand why it is wrong or right.  Seek to understand why.

Practical Ways to Target Competence

Here are some ideas you can use immediately to strive for competence.  Add your own ideas in the comments!

• Go beyond the material - In classes, use the standard curriculum as a starting point for your personal inquiry, not the whole of your learning.  Do research projects on topics that interest you, on your own, to quench your curiosity.  The same goes for workshops, e-Learning courses, webinars, and other project management resources.  The fact you are reading this is a testament to your commitment! 
• Ask people to catch you screwing up - Actively poll your team, co-workers, stakeholders, everyone.  Ask probing questions like "I was wondering if you had any ideas for how I could do [whatever] better next time?"  The more specific your question, the better.  If you just ask "How was that?" people will nod their heads and say "fine" almost every time.
• Earning PDUs is not the goal - Look, if you go seek PDUs for the sake of PDUs, you're doing it wrong.  Someone seeking competence in project management has more PDUs than they know what to do with.  Remembering to document them is the hard part.

Share this with your network

I receive many passionate questions from the studio audience about which degree they should go after, how to prepare for a certification, and how to land a job as a project manager.

But many of them missed a step.

Is This For You?

Before diving in to the world of project management, it's important to take a step back and evaluate if this is even something you want to do.

A good starting point are my previous articles, the 10 Attributes I Look for in New Project Managers, and Run Away! (And Other Helpful Advice For A Career in Project Management).

Besides those attributes and passions I discussed in those articles, I tend to see one trait in common among people who end up being good at managing projects.

You know how they say if you love your work, it never feels like work?  That's not entirely true, but it is mostly true.

Loving to Bridge the Gap

This is the one thing that will carry you through tough times while managing projects.  But only if you really love it.

What I mean is a love for helping people understand each other.  I found very early in my career that I really enjoyed finding the little clues in a group conversation where I could tell people were not on the same page.  They were talking past each other, or at each other, many times without even realizing it.

I wasn't even particularly good at it in the beginning, and I continue to get better.

The second part of the process that I love it figuring out the right questions to ask, in the moment, to get people on the same page.  It's not a matter of demanding answers or chiding people; it's about asking the leading questions that will force clarity into the conversation.

For me, there's nothing better than the epiphany people get when they realize what the other person was really talking about, when all along they thought it was something different altogether.  Sometimes it's a look of astonishment, sometimes it's laughter, sometimes it's a groan.  Either way, suddenly the conversation 'clicks' into place and real progress starts being made.

And this is why project management is perfect for me.  In my role, I can find at least one situation like this every day.  Between my team members...stakeholders...managers and directors...customers.  Every communication channel contains the possibility of miscommunication, and therefore an opportunity for me to help resolve the disturbance.  This is just one of the things I love about project management.

Every day, I can do what I love.

Ask Yourself

Before you head down any career path, ask yourself honestly what it is that you love to do.  I don't mean as a job, but what are the little things you enjoy and would like to do more of?  What are the things you abhor and want to do less of?  Only after this analysis should you decide whether or not project management is for you. 

I feel strongly about this and so the first 2 (out of 5) modules of my PM Career Coaching course are dedicated to finding the answers to these questions for yourself.  I have a structured approach with worksheets, but you can just get out a sheet of paper and start writing down the things you enjoy and the things you don't enjoy.  These are activities and behaviors, not jobs.

You might be disuaded from going after a career in project management.  If so, great! 

The primary goal is to find the work you love.  If that is not project management, so be it. 

Go find out what it is you love.

Share this with your network

Learning a lesson the hard way for the second time is a bitter pill to swallow.

It will suffice to say that my believe in continuous I&T has been strongly reinforced.  Partially due to my late arrival on one of my projects, and partially due to circumstances beyond the control of myself or my team, we were only able to do real integrated testing in the last few months.

We're still reeling from the consequences of not having started doing so much earlier.

Benefits of end-to-end testing, early and often:

1. Find internal interface problems early - In a complex software system, unit testing is necessary but not sufficient.  Those internal components need to be speaking the same language to talk to each other properly, and even if you are coding to the same set of specifications there will be difference in interpretation.  That is why integrated testing is so important.
2. Find external interface problems early - When your system interfaces with other systems built by other teams, this becomes even more important.  There are more changes for interpretations to be different when teams attend different discussions and assumptions get made.
3. Team building - I can't stress this one enough.  If your team is made up of people working in silos on their own little components who rarely throw them together and see what breaks, you lose out on so much beneficial communication and collaboration amongst your team.

So, even if you are not doing an agile approach, it's still important to do a build of your system every few weeks or once a month and see what breaks.  After all, the purpose of testing is to try to break what you've built.  Your team may be uncomfortable with this, especially if they are used to being able to polish their own individual pieces before displaying them to the world.

In this case, it pays dividends to be uncomfortable.  Discipline yourself and your teams to be comfortable with little, continuous simulated failures, so that you don't have to deal with a large, catastrophic failure on your project.

Share this with your network

I was recently interviewed and asked the question, "What should hiring managers be looking for in a new project manager?"

These are the top 10 qualities I look for:

         1. Lifelong learner - You'd better not just be here to punch the clock and try to make it through the day.  I want to see passion.

         2. Clear communicator - Concise and clear communication with the ability to verify you've been understood.

         3. Problem solving abilities - You are going to have a lot of problems, and you'd better be the type of person who will take the bull by the horns and make it your business to resolve them.

         4. Ability to focus - Focus is critical.  If you are all over the place and unable to focus, I probably don't want to hire you as a project manager.  How are you going to focus a team if you can't focus yourself?

         5. Ability to create a plan and execute it - Even if you have little work experience, you probably have something you can show to demonstrate your ability to set goals, formulate a plan to acheive them and follow through.

         6. Empathy - ability to look at a situation from different perspectives.  You have lots of different stakeholders and some of them want your project to die.  Step into their shoes and it will help you be successful.

         7. Self-starter - I want people who thrive when given room to breathe.  I want people who feel stiflied by micro-management and instead want to demonstrate their own ability to go out and produce results.

         8. Listening skills - Being able to pick up on cues in body language and tone is just as important as listening.  I mean really listening to what people have to say.  Too many people are arrogant enough to think what they have to say is the most important.

         9. Ability to lead without relying on role power - So many new managers and project managers fall into the trap of thinking formal authority actually has something to do with leadership.  It really doesn't.  Leadership is about people wanting to follow you because they trust you, not because you told them so.

        10. Domain knowledge - Yes, I want someone with domain knowledge.  Project Management skills are broadly applicable, but you are dead in some domains if you don't have knowledge about that domain.  In fact, most domains.  If your experience is close enough to overlap, great.  But you'd better understand what your teams are doing at a fairly deep level if you want me to hire you.

What do you think of these attributes?  Do you have more to add?

Share this with your network