Insights

Where do Project Managers come from?

It's hard to imagine a little girl saying "When I grow up I want to be a Project Manager", or picture some kid in high school considering this as a career path; you can't actually go to school and become a Project Manager.

So, where do Project Managers come from? Well from very diverse backgrounds.

I, for example, am a Fashion Designer with a marketing and communication formation. One of my leads is a Graphic Designer, a colleague of mine is an Economist and another girl I used to work with was an industrial designer.

The question remains, how do we all get here?

What we have in common is that usually our paths took a turn into doing what others wouldn't do, our people skills got us into working with teams and pretty soon there was a project that was organized and nobody knew how; see that's another perk, you're always backstage.

In my case that's great, I think people work better when they shine for what they're good at, instead of worrying about who gets the credit. But that's a story for later.

Presumably, we've always had some sort of management within our projects. You really don't think that the people who built the pyramids and the Chinese wall where self organized teams that worked willingly and proactively; but the more technical, modern and documented approaches come around the 1950's, with the Gant diagram appearance, the critical path method conception and the PERT technique introduction.

Later, in 1965 the IPMA institute was born, as the first institution that worked towards networking and researching in the field.

Since then, tons of methodologies and processes have appeared on the field. So, have different breeds of PM's as different projects require more of their help or not.

Even though now we have a lot of tools into educating ourselves and becoming accredited professionals, I believe a key ingredient into the PM sauce is experience.

Each field brings a flavor that ultimately will add resources to the table, if not to this project, to the next one. Believe it, no experience is vain on our field.

Maybe you didn't know what to do as a teenager, maybe you had a different life planned out, but clearly, now, you'd calmly go to your younger self and tell them:

Don't worry, you'll grow up to handle anything. You're going to be a Project Manager

About the author

Sylvia is an enduring, moving forward and practical Project Manager, who has been involved in Advertising and Marketing as well as Technology Management. Besides her experience on Scrum Agile Delivery, she has set her mind on Agile certifications to become an expert on her field, she's been managing several teams at the same time for Financial Services business unit, making her a reference point for problem solving on delivery dependencies to ensure the roadmap expectations are realistic and achievable