‘So what do you say you ‘do’ around here, anyway?’

I love it when I flip channels and see this clip from Office Space.

Most of the time I find it hard to tell people exactly what I do. Since I put this out there publicly today, I should probably spend some time in the present, and tell people what I am out here doing.

I tend to get classified as a program manager. Lump that together with all the things that you think that can be; project manager, portfolio manager, team lead, manager, etc. Things of that ilk.

Now, I don’t think this is an accurate description of my abilities. Nor for anyone else, actually. Project professionals tend to have quite a varied experience palette, and many of the fine professionals with which I have worked in the past have super interesting abilities. To paint them with a broad brush is a bit of a travesty, but for the sake of argument, lets do it anyway.

I like being an IT PM-type. It does a couple of things: gives you a set scope and set of goals to work towards. You usually get a team of individual contributors to help you, though you don’t manage them, you have to influence them instead, which I find to be a more unique skill set. In addition to (usually) not having a direct team, you also have a few other things to manage, such as a budget, reporting cadences, meeting notes, issue logs, forecasting and tabulating labor spend, hardware costs, licensing and other miscellaneous things. These are all part of the job. Even if you don’t think you need to manage them, they are all still there.

I tend to use the PM role to step into an organization to see it from an internal perspective. I like to see how things operate. It’s a great way to see how the culture influences the work, or if the work influences the culture. Neither of those variations are negative. I am comfortable working with formal teams with a high degree of complexity and criticality, just as much as a low-level deliverable on a large workstream. Both should be executed well, but having the understanding of the desired outcome and it’s place within the overarching plan and organization helps me determine how to influence, guiide, shape, direct, motivate, etc.

I also love this role as it is a people-centric role. Your influence on a team in this capability can be a long-lasting effect. While I get to stress the deliverables, manage the effort, report the progress, I also get to understand the team members and gauge their contributions. I get to work with people. Not things. Not analytics. People.

To bring it back to ‘Office Space’ there is certainly a bit of the IT industry that would have a hard time telling efficiency consultants what they do for a living. This industry has some nebulous roles that shift in importance based on what the economy/organization/resource pool may be doing at any given moment. I have, at times, told team members that ‘my Jump To Conclusions mat is just out of frame, positioned on this side of the open window of my tenth floor office.’