Years ago, a colleague taught a product management course through our local university extension program. A feature of the course was that they convened a panel of product and project managers as an ask-us-anything resource for their students. One of my favorite episodes serving on that panel was when one of the students asked, “How do you know if you are the type of person to be a successful project manager?” Each of the panelists recalled a point in their careers or earlier in their lives that in hindsight clearly showed that they were destined to be project managers. They talked about sorting their toys as a child, alphabetizing books or music as a teen, keeping checklists, using spreadsheets to organize, playing a peacemaker role in social or group work settings, and being a translator between different viewpoints. But my favorite was the person who described organized their wedding with MS Project. That, we agreed, was clearly the hallmark of someone destined to be a project manager.
I consider myself an “Accidental” Project Manager: I didn’t know that was what I wanted to do or that I would spend the majority of my career doing it. I started my career as a software engineer, spent many years doing that, eventually discovering that I was never going to be brilliant at it and that I was not satisfied with the limits to how many problems or the size of problems that I could solve for my users. That realization drove me to look for a way to be able to solve more and bigger problems beyond my own limits. The solution was managing project teams who in turn solved business problems. This allowed me to lead teams in creating solutions on a scale I could never have solved myself and satisfied my need to solve bigger problems. Again, over time, I had the realization that I could help solve even more and even bigger problems by managing teams of project managers, helping them find the success that I had at solving individual problems with projects. In a sense I see this as a kind of uplift effort that leverages the things I’ve learned and insights I’ve gained over my career.
That said, the signs were there from the start. I was one of those kids that alphabetized their books and records, I often felt that I served the role of translator between different viewpoints, and I still use spreadsheets to organize… EVERYTHING!
