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As long as you’re a generally organized person you should be fine. The post above me has some very good details on meetings. I just got a new PM job after about 5 years as a PM at my old job, and meetings are going to be a much bigger deal at my new job. (40% raise doesn’t hurt either  )Something that was asked of me in my interview was, which is more important, the process or the people? I answered the people, because if the people are taken care of, you’ll get good results every time as a matter of course. But it does mean needing to be the conversation wrangler and cutting people off if need be. Not to mention interfacing with clients. This is a people job.
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May 10, 2022 13:35
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Thanks guys, I appreciate the great advice! I'll try to make use of as much of it as I can. Although progress was glacial up until recently, apparently the project was first thought up two years ago... and they're only thinking of having someone (me) write a codified project plan now.  In all fairness, COVID took its toll and this isn't some massive multinational but rather a non-profit with like 30 guys tops (plus there wasn't anyone available to focus only on the project until I was hired) but I'm still a little taken aback. Are there any typical project plan items I could reasonably dispense with given the organisation's relatively small scale, or am I better served listening to my instincts and just attempting to draw up a plan in its entirety, even if it feels a little like overkill?
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May 11, 2022 01:17
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Soup Inspector posted:Thanks guys, I appreciate the great advice! I'll try to make use of as much of it as I can.
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May 11, 2022 01:41
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I have 4 years experience doing extremely variable part-time unpaid project management (events). Is there any point in getting a CAPM? How do I know if I qualify for the PMP?
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May 13, 2022 16:51
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Maera Sior posted:I have 4 years experience doing extremely variable part-time unpaid project management (events). Is there any point in getting a CAPM? How do I know if I qualify for the PMP? https://www.pmi.org/certifications/project-management-pmp
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May 13, 2022 16:56
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I know the requirements they call for to take the PMP exam (36 months), I'm just not sure if what I did fully counts towards it. My schedule is *extremely* erratic and I have no way to count the number of hours I've put in over the years. I have no problem trudging along in some paid job until I'm confident I qualify for the PMP exam if that's what it takes, but I'm dubious that taking the CAPM is worth anything.
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May 14, 2022 04:57
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Maera Sior posted:I know the requirements they call for to take the PMP exam (36 months), I'm just not sure if what I did fully counts towards it. My schedule is *extremely* erratic and I have no way to count the number of hours I've put in over the years. Any experience on projects counts as long as you can spin it with a straight face and your boss will vouch for you if you get audited. Just estimate. If you worked 40% of the time on projects, and worked 2080 hours/year, that's 832 hours towards your requirements. You use the same poo poo for estimating your effort for qualifying for a PMP as you would when planning resource estimates for a project.
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May 16, 2022 00:19
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Dik Hz posted:You use the same poo poo for estimating your effort for qualifying for a PMP as you would when planning resource estimates for a project. Make up whatever number will win the contract award?
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May 16, 2022 02:30
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Does anyone have a recommendation on a tool I can use to do "what if" schedules for a project? E.G. I know the amount of work that needs to be done, but I need to see what the dates would look like with 2 resources, 3, 4, 5, etc.. I'm sure MSProject can do this, but is there anything 'lighter'?
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May 27, 2022 19:17
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I am very envious of PMs who have resources who actually deliver. Being able to say “you work on this task for two hours” and then get a completed task… unbelievable. I’ve had one bear of a project on my shoulders for a year and change. We had a contractor developer brought in for it, he did great work to get us 85% to close and then his contract ended and he moved on. Since the project was so close to the end, it was given to two of our in-house devs. That was in November. We are probably further away from finishing than we were at the beginning of the year because these devs seem to break something for everything they do, or it just takes them ages to “do”. It’s imploding, as I told my boss. The solution: . No solution, this is just our pace. If it takes a while that’s out of our hands. Add that the resources assigned to this also have other projects that they are making similar progress with, with a new priority job that’ll be assigned to them soon, and I get misty-eyed for a work culture that, idk, more accurately assessed the capabilities of their employees. When it takes someone two weeks to add a few columns to a spreadsheet I feel like that’s a problem. I’m know I not the greatest pm even in our department, but it feels like a problem out of my control and I just have to keep spinning small accomplishments for update after update. /rant LawfulWaffle fucked around with this message at 18:30 on May 31, 2022 |
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May 31, 2022 18:25
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If you don't have dedicated people you don't have people. That sounds a lot like your developers have like five bosses - of course any given project is moving slowly.
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May 31, 2022 23:52
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Not sure if this is the right topic for this question or not, apologies if not! I've begun looking to escape my academia career because, wow, academia sucks poo poo and I've just been finding out more and more recently that my org has hosed me in multiple ways - like 50% salary 50% job expectations. So I retooled my resume a handful of times and have generally been applying to entry-level industry laboratory jobs, cause that's what my career has been for 9 years, a laboratory professional in academic healthcare research. I submitted an application to a staffing agency specifically for a Bench Scientist I job, sounds cool, hooray one more app out the door. I received an email from the same staffing agency about a remote job opening that is much different than what I applied for: an Opinion Leader Relations Operations Manager. I'm looking it over and my interest is piqued but I'm just hoping someone could maybe tell me a little bit mroe about what potentially managing "KOL initiatives" is like - it looks largely like project management, which I've experience in for sure, but I'm just trying to get a bit more insight before following up with the recruiter. Thanks!
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Jun 8, 2022 12:08
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That job specifically lists previously working with Pzifer executives as a qualification. I wouldn’t get my hopes up.
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Jun 8, 2022 12:30
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Oh I'm not getting my hopes up, just intrigued! And I have worked with Pfizer before, so 
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Jun 8, 2022 12:32
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A PM thread?!? I'm in finance but work with a whole lotta PM's. Anyone work with EVMS? I had been working at my last job at simple examples to show why planning 0 overtime is a mistake that leads to cascading issues like increased overtime, slippage, decline in safety, quality issues, & more. Curious if anyone's got resources on that? Basic idea is your sales/engineering/whatever team creates the initial plan - labor & material budgeted out. The sales side may inflate it a bit before passing it to the customer. A good PM will make as honest a plan off these figures as possible. A bad PM will just cut the figures ~10% and with a goal of coming in 10% under budget. Which they'll fail to do. The cut budget never being reasonable causes cascading labor build ups & overtime needs to just stay on track. When something goes wrong (something always goes wrong) - they have no capacity to adjust as their labor is already working OT & burning out to stay on their original, 10% too light, budget. The concept falls on deaf ears for bad PM's without explicit, simple examples though because in their mind - if they planned 10% under, even with slippage, they'll still be okay. The last job they managed which was wildly over budget & late was an exception because [poo poo reasons]. Worst PM I've ever interacted with was a 3rd party IT software deployment/management company that planned an ERP upgrade on 2'x1' poster boards. On the other side I can't understate how much I've learned from good PM's. I'm fascinated by all the "PM is not a leadership role" statements. Organizing people, resources, responsible budgeting & scheduling, obtaining reasonable updates, taking ownership of a project & problems, allocating & reallocating, communication communication & communication... is leadership?
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Jun 8, 2022 17:58
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Any recommendations for a book or podcast that's fun but you can also learn from it? Maybe some kind of PM war stories? I'm a non-technical PM who manages the company's IT department so bonus points if it fits my situation.
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Aug 22, 2022 23:38
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Doctor Malaver posted:Any recommendations for a book or podcast that's fun but you can also learn from it? Maybe some kind of PM war stories? The Phoenix Project
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Aug 23, 2022 14:04
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Thanks, looks promising.
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Aug 25, 2022 20:13
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Anyone got free PDU recommendations?
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Aug 27, 2022 23:52
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Dik Hz posted:Anyone got free PDU recommendations? Projectmanagement.com has free webinars
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Aug 31, 2022 01:14
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Dik Hz posted:Anyone got free PDU recommendations? If you have access to LinkedIn Learning through your employer they have a lot of videos that provide PDUs, I did all of mine through that. Or paying for it yourself for a month is probably a lot cheaper than a lot of PDU sources.
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Sep 1, 2022 15:23
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lament.cfg posted:Does anyone have a recommendation on a tool I can use to do "what if" schedules for a project? Bwahahahahaha resources, get a load of this guy. Next thing you know you’ll want teams of people to work (big complicated expensive project.) Ha resources. Why yes I’m a bitter project manager why do you ask.
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Oct 15, 2022 18:41
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Tnuctip posted:Bwahahahahaha resources, get a load of this guy. Next thing you know you’ll want teams of people to work (big complicated expensive project.) I have resources but terrible project managers... PM: we need resources for project X Me: This person is available based on the amount of work and other projects My Employee 4 months later: this project hasn't had a single meeting Me: 
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Oct 16, 2022 06:26
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Hello project manager thread, technical IC here. Have noticed a pattern in $LARGE_ORGANIZATION and would like an outside perspective on how to come up with a realistic timeline for a project: What is the best way to deal with dependency teams (platform/infrastructure) that cause delays by ignoring requests, and only seem to move if escalated to the team's skip-skip level? When asked what happened, the most common answer is that they don't know what happened and, one time when we pushed further, that breaking SLA was inevitable because our team wasn't in their prioritization at the start of the year. We didn't even know they existed (frequent re-orgs). On the other hand, the executives are saying that the company should take a "bottom-up approach" to streamline processes, so they're clearly aware. Because it's a $LARGE_ORGANIZATION and re-orgs happen all the time, HLDs would take a lot longer to write if we must identify all of the exact people dependencies for a given project (and even if we did, another re-org could happen during the project if surprise delays go on for too long). Since different teams have different MOs when it comes to responsiveness and their SLAs, that makes it even harder to come up with realistic Sprint estimations. It seems the only effective strategy is to just escalate immediately after making every request and not to have any patience with anyone: to make even more noise than their other requests... but that doesn't seem healthy for anyone.
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Nov 18, 2022 16:37
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Love Stole the Day posted:Hello project manager thread, technical IC here. Have noticed a pattern in $LARGE_ORGANIZATION and would like an outside perspective on how to come up with a realistic timeline for a project: Add it to the Risk log (you do have a risk log right?) and highlight it at your next executive steering committee meeting. You won't be successful trying to fix a dysfunctional process. Make sure everyone knows about it and then escalate each of the requests after your make them.
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Nov 18, 2022 22:07
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How common are multiple interviews for PM positions? I have one for an IT PM role that would elevate me from a “management analyst doing PM work” pit but the HR person who called me to schedule the interview made it sound like this would be the first of a series and that the first one was more informal. Are technical assessments common? Should I brush up on memorizing all the inputs, tools and techniques? I have my CAPM and am planning on getting my PMP this year, but I don’t know if having a cert is generally considered proof of knowing the PM basics.
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Jan 24, 2023 13:18
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LawfulWaffle posted:How common are multiple interviews for PM positions? I have one for an IT PM role that would elevate me from a “management analyst doing PM work” pit but the HR person who called me to schedule the interview made it sound like this would be the first of a series and that the first one was more informal. Are technical assessments common? Should I brush up on memorizing all the inputs, tools and techniques? I have my CAPM and am planning on getting my PMP this year, but I don’t know if having a cert is generally considered proof of knowing the PM basics. Every single pm position I’ve interviewed for has asked the question, “tell me about a time a project was failing. What did you do about it? What was the result?” And the question, “tell me about a time you had to work with a difficult team member” Also, “Tell me about a time you got unexpected results” was really common. I also have gotten “Tell me about a time you had to communicate bad news” a couple times. Dik Hz fucked around with this message at 13:46 on Jan 24, 2023 |
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Jan 24, 2023 13:42
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As far as the interview process, that's going to vary widely by company. Some will do one interview, some will do a bazillion for any position.
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Jan 24, 2023 15:15
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Dik Hz posted:Hiring managers care way more about practical experience. Nobody is going to grill you on the ittos. Be prepared to talk about examples from your past that reflect the different phases of projects. Communication is the most import skill a pm has so make sure to show your skill through professional communication at every opportunity. Thank you for the sample questions. I wrote them and my answers out as practice, and I’ll refine them as the week goes on. I could ramble about my “difficult team member” for an hour, but I don’t want to outright say “and that’s why I’m here today” I was asked to be an interviewer for a role similar to my own a few months ago and I was both surprised and encouraged by the generally poor quality of responses by the applicants. One was asked “what’s a project that you would like to revisit and what would you do differently” and they answered “I can’t think of any.” Hopefully I’m up against applicants of that quality. One thing nearly all the applicants asked about was the interview->decision timeline. Is that tacky? I didn’t have to answer it so it didn’t bother me, but I plan on asking it myself and I don’t want to be gauche. Or maybe it shows me as being curious about details, idk
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Jan 24, 2023 16:01
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LawfulWaffle posted:One thing nearly all the applicants asked about was the interview->decision timeline. Is that tacky? I didn’t have to answer it so it didn’t bother me, but I plan on asking it myself and I don’t want to be gauche. Or maybe it shows me as being curious about details, idk
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Jan 24, 2023 16:17
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Asking about a timeline is never tacky. Remember you're interviewing them as much as they're interviewing you.
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Jan 24, 2023 16:52
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LawfulWaffle posted:
My greatest weakness is I care too much and work too hard! You would think people would prepare for interviews but most do not and are terrible.
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Jan 24, 2023 18:38
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nashona posted:Asking about a timeline is never tacky. Remember you're interviewing them as much as they're interviewing you. This right here. If you're a good PM, they probably need you a lot more than you need them. Ask a lot of questions about how their current processes work and how you'll fit into them.
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Jan 24, 2023 18:56
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I'm looking to make the jump into PMing and I would like to get a a couple ideas and a sanity check about what I'm trying to do. The bulk of my experience is in the film industry, where I would be the point person gently encouraging principal actors and background actors (extras) to get ready and that the departments getting them ready were doing their jobs on time, all from essentially the bottom of the org chart. Currently, I manage covid testing for big film promotion events (think premieres and press junkets), where my job more closely matches PMing vs Ops. I'm confident in my stable of soft skills, but both my prior jobs were completely informally structured (no PMIS at all) and narrow in both scope and schedule and my BS is in Microbiology. I understand from this thread and other sources that the PMBOK exists in somewhat of a fantasy land wrt ideal PMing vs actual PMing and I believe I need to get my feet wet in structured PM work and not try to fake my way in somewhere to get blown out of the water when I can't lean on a mature PMO or document repository. What job titles and industries should I be looking for where my lack of hard skills makes sense? Healthcare makes a lot of sense as it's the industry I'm in now and tech is something I could get up to speed with but is a bloodbath in terms of hiring right now; should I broaden my scope or do I have too many things working against me? I have a CAPM exam scheduled in a week (cost being the factor vs the PMP) to learn the vocabulary and show that I'm moderately competent. I would ideally slot into a sub-PM role in a big enough corporation willing to pay for more specialized PM training, should one exist. Is this a sane route or is there something wildly obvious or integral that I've overlooked? In this post, I am using the Expert Judgement Tool. theflyingexecutive fucked around with this message at 02:28 on Feb 19, 2023 |
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Feb 19, 2023 02:25
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theflyingexecutive posted:I'm looking to make the jump into PMing and I would like to get a a couple ideas and a sanity check about what I'm trying to do. The bulk of my experience is in the film industry, where I would be the point person gently encouraging principal actors and background actors (extras) to get ready and that the departments getting them ready were doing their jobs on time, all from essentially the bottom of the org chart. Currently, I manage covid testing for big film promotion events (think premieres and press junkets), where my job more closely matches PMing vs Ops. I'm confident in my stable of soft skills, but both my prior jobs were completely informally structured (no PMIS at all) and narrow in both scope and schedule and my BS is in Microbiology. I'm a project manager at a 50-100 employees company and I barely know any of the acronyms from your post. Maybe you're overlooking PM opportunities that aren't so corporate and formalized.
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Feb 20, 2023 14:55
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My position is a "[subset of department] specialist" and it's absolutely a PM role. Look for positions that need the skills you already have but also require coordinating large groups of people or activities from beginning to end.
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Feb 20, 2023 15:04
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Doctor Malaver posted:I'm a project manager at a 50-100 employees company and I barely know any of the acronyms from your post. Maybe you're overlooking PM opportunities that aren't so corporate and formalized. Maera Sior posted:My position is a "[subset of department] specialist" and it's absolutely a PM role. Look for positions that need the skills you already have but also require coordinating large groups of people or activities from beginning to end. Thanks for the feedback! My main problem is that I lack a lot of transferable hard skills. Film is always going to be siloed off into 80 hour/week film jobs with very difficult career progression and running covid testing events is also rather self-limiting. I suppose why I see myself looking at more formalized corporate roles is that they're the most likely to have extensive onboarding for their specific PM style and my proficiency won't have to come from years of experience in the field.
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Feb 24, 2023 00:58
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Looking into just getting this stupid cert already. Any recommended resources for the exam?
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Feb 24, 2023 14:36
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theflyingexecutive posted:I suppose why I see myself looking at more formalized corporate roles is that they're the most likely to have extensive onboarding for their specific PM style and my proficiency won't have to come from years of experience in the field. PM as taught by the PMBOK is at best highly aspirational.
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Feb 24, 2023 19:22
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Doc Fission posted:Looking into just getting this stupid cert already. Any recommended resources for the exam? I used Pocket Prep Professional to gamify my study questions for $20/month. Their questions are much better written (at least for the CAPM), but are comprehensive of the PMBOK and are broken down to help you re-study missed questions and weak categories. Dik Hz posted:If you’re expecting corporate environments to have formal and relevant onboarding, you might want to adjust your expectations. Adjusted! I'm putting apps in now and am hitting a bit of a hurdle where I'm interested in applying for tech PM roles (understanding the industry is in a hiring bloodbath right now), but can't legitimately say I have any software development management experience, even Scrum. Is there a job role under PM in tech that isn't "coder who is also forced to schedule"? This is of course separate from the hurdle of clicking thirty million construction Project Manager roles, which are very very different than healthcare or tech ones.
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Mar 9, 2023 02:09
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