I'm taking a project management class every morning this week. The teacher is great-she has every certification I've ever heard of, is funny, and has lots of experience doing all sorts of projects.
Most of the class is group work. She introduces a topic like how to identify and deal with risk, then we go into groups and do that using a case study. I'm in a group where we all have roles and I guess we're going to get a "project" to do that involves us actually planning, creating, testing and releasing something by Friday.
The people in the class are either project managers in groups like me or technical people who are going to start managing projects. Everyone is friendly and the group discussions are intense. I actually already know about five of the twelve people.
After class today my manager called me and my peer in to tell us that there is going to be some other types of project management work we can do besides quality. He said (and he really was sincere) that we need to think about how we can be best prepared for senior project management jobs or other jobs in the company and he thought we'd get burnt out if we do the same thing all the time. Seriously. So we said "Sure."
After that I had my first Quality meeting with a new project team. These are folks that are very deep into the details of the content that we're serving--they're the ones that can look at something and say "That comma shouldn't be there" and give you the reason why in legal terms. I was worried that they would either not be interested in Quality or just not participate. They did, however, have a lot of questions for each other about how we are testing and though a portion was over my head (writing the minutes is going to suck), we had a productive hour.
Those first few minutes of the meeting were tough. Even though I know they're nice people, it's pretty intimidating when a group of people you really don't know all look at you waiting for you to say the right thing. It takes me back to my short teaching career when 25 people did that. The only way to approach that problem is preparation, preparation, preparation. Too bad I like things to be spontaneous. Oh well, this is only for five years.
Most of the class is group work. She introduces a topic like how to identify and deal with risk, then we go into groups and do that using a case study. I'm in a group where we all have roles and I guess we're going to get a "project" to do that involves us actually planning, creating, testing and releasing something by Friday.
The people in the class are either project managers in groups like me or technical people who are going to start managing projects. Everyone is friendly and the group discussions are intense. I actually already know about five of the twelve people.
After class today my manager called me and my peer in to tell us that there is going to be some other types of project management work we can do besides quality. He said (and he really was sincere) that we need to think about how we can be best prepared for senior project management jobs or other jobs in the company and he thought we'd get burnt out if we do the same thing all the time. Seriously. So we said "Sure."
After that I had my first Quality meeting with a new project team. These are folks that are very deep into the details of the content that we're serving--they're the ones that can look at something and say "That comma shouldn't be there" and give you the reason why in legal terms. I was worried that they would either not be interested in Quality or just not participate. They did, however, have a lot of questions for each other about how we are testing and though a portion was over my head (writing the minutes is going to suck), we had a productive hour.
Those first few minutes of the meeting were tough. Even though I know they're nice people, it's pretty intimidating when a group of people you really don't know all look at you waiting for you to say the right thing. It takes me back to my short teaching career when 25 people did that. The only way to approach that problem is preparation, preparation, preparation. Too bad I like things to be spontaneous. Oh well, this is only for five years.
posted by changingagain at 7:45 PM
1 Comments:
The project management classes sound cool! Training- what a novel idea! :)
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