How I hit ‘Enter’ on becoming a Project Manager

For context, I didn’t go to University (the teachers only talked to some pupils at my school about university). I didn’t mind though because I was 100% sure that all I wanted to do was to work with horses! Fortunately (or unfortunately it felt to me at the time) my Mum insisted I do at least a year of college so I did a year’s Secretarial course at my local Further Education College (it’s so long ago, I can only find a black and white picture of it!).

As I looked at all the job roles out there, I felt that having had limited experience of working in a business, I would start looking initially at project support roles (eg Project Support Officer), rather than going into a full on Project Manager role. I was so excited to get my first role at a regional car manufacturer. This was part as of a huge team of individuals supporting a global software implementation. My income went from about £60/day, to £250/day. Game on.

Another couple of support roles, this time in the arena of Estates & Facilities. At one NHS Trust I worked on the refurbishment of three hospital wards at an acute adult mental health hospital. On another I visited multiple properties looking proactively for and logging repairs and issues (multiple site to site journeys each day).

Next it was onto a regional NHS commissioning body where I did many, many pivot tables in Excel to help assess and quantify patient demand and predict activity patterns to help scope out requirement for an urgent care centre.

My first role as a Project Manager! Another role in the NHS and this time in a community NHS setting. This was such an interesting project – implementing two software systems that enabled touch of a button nurse>patient allocation, capacity management and route optimisation. Really interesting and challenging, very busy, and involving driving to multiple sites each day.

Here comes the second Project Manager role. This time at a local-to-me regional hospital Trust implementing a software tool which identified whether patients were in the right level of care for their current clinical needs and if not, why not. Managed this virtually single-handedly to drive compliance up to +85% in the daily completion of patient assessments for every patient in the system.

Now I went into the world of permanent employment and joined an arms length government body based in Birmingham. I worked as a Project Manager as part of a team sitting in the organisation’s Portfolio Management Office. Here was born a passion for PMO (project / programme / portfolio management offices) that continues today.

Off to my first experience working for a consultancy firm. My first role was managing a PMO for a large transformation programme at a Council who were overhauling all their systems including moving to Windows 10 and introducing Microsoft 365. I did numerous other project and PMO roles including Microsoft 365 adoption, PMO Manager roles for ERP programmes, Microsoft 365 training, and project assurance support. Very interesting work, lots of variety.

As 2022 hits you’d have found me firmly in the world of contracting where I’m not employed by an organisation, I work independently usually through my limited company. In this capacity I do one PMO Lead role and one Senior PMO Analyst role – two really interesting projects/programmes.

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If you’ve already embarked on your journey into project management let me know how you approached it and where you are with it now. How easy or difficult did you find it? Leave a comment or catch up with us in the Real Life PM community forums where we chat about topics that come up in the Blog or Newsletters.