It Begins

I am glad you asked. If you are like me, you have this weird, uneasy feeling of dissatisfaction with what is out there in the world for project management or even in the agile space with the established frameworks. Surely there is a better way, right? One purpose of this blog is to talk about my journey through the years with project management, moving from fixation on process to focusing on people, from closing projects to delivering value. If this is the kind of stuff you enjoy you are in the right place. If you are looking for a prescriptive process, this isn’t it. I really can’t tell you what will work for you in your context. I can only speak to what worked (and what did not) from my life experience.

Like many people, becoming a project manager was an accident. Sort of. I was in the US Air Force for a little less than 9 years. In that time became an avionics technician and instructor. I served as shift supervisor for a time after becoming an E-5, Staff Sergeant rank in the Air Force. When I became an instructor, one of the courses taken as part of the practicum was Instructional System Design. So what, you say? Stay with me, there will be a payoff to this important event in my life.

As it would happen, I ended up with the person who authored the technical books used to study for career progression in my field as a student in my classes. He was the only one and a very experienced technician. He was well on his way to E-8 if I remember correctly and would not really be as hands on with the systems as most technicians since he was to be in a supervisory role.

This turned out to be fortuitous as he was less than two years from full retirement when he received a call from a friend of his recruiting for a technical instructor of avionics. We had been talking between subjects and told him about having completed my two associates degrees and bachelor’s degree as I prepared to decide if we were going to re-enlist in the next few months and wanted to have options. Well, it happened he got that call but declined to pursue the opportunity due to being so close to retirement. He kindly passed the information on to me.

One thing led to another, and I ended up with an offer. I said to my wife, “What do you think about living in Iowa?”

“Iowa? What is in Iowa," she asked. Valid point.

“I don’t know, let’s find out,” I replied.

We moved to Iowa and raised our family during my odyssey of a career and consider it home. Yes, we are Iowan by choice.

During my first job I moved from delivery courses to managing course development. I heard about this project management thing. The company was incredibly supportive of development and happened to be full of program managers and engineers, so project management was a natural thing for them to promote and encourage. So, I took the course. My life was changed significantly as a result. More on this later, especially the key AHA! moment for me during the class.

My hope is that in the end, you come out of this with an idea for an approach for you that might work, with the understanding that no plan survives contact with reality; there will be changes. And that is ok, if it is based on learning. Changing it for no reason is just chaos trying to get lucky. Another purpose for this is to try to contribute to the community at large and to help build up the next generation of project leaders. The average age of project managers is over 40. We need to build bench strength across the profession. Even in the Agile world there is a place for skills of a project manager. However, those skills need to be augmented with other competencies and skills that are not traditionally thought of as project management and called out with intention.

Let’s get going and begin this journey.