IT Director And Project Manager
Career review from a person working in the job
How I Got The Job
My Education: BS in Management, Merrimack College Executive Education, The Wharton School
My Prior Experience: I owned a small landscape construction for three years leading up to my current job
My Job Profile
My Company: I work for a strategic planning consulting firm based in Massachusetts
Job/Career Overview: For my job, i am responsible for identifying IT needs through analyzing business practices. By doing this, i am able to see deficiencies in operational processes and, where appropriate, research and assign IT solutions. I work from home, but my day is really no different from people who commute to work everyday. Most of my day is filled with conference calls with both my colleagues and outside vendors. I typically work about three or four technical solutions at a time.
Because my job is fairly technical, I rely on a large team of people both from my firm and from vendor teams to help select and customize all of our solutions. It is not uncommon for multiple vendor teams to work with me on a given project. For example, we recently revamped our phone system. To most, this is a fairly straight forward project, but in reality it was one of my more complex projects. In addition to our internal team, we had vendor teams assembled from four different companies. One important learning experience I was able to take away from this project was that when working with phones companies, the more help you can assemble, the better. Phone companies are notoriously difficult to work with.
Love It? Hate It?
I rate this career 3 out of 10.
What I Love or Hate
One of the best parts of my jobs is the ability to work from home. This allows for tremendous flexibility during the day. For example, if I have to go to the dentist, I do not need to take time off or vacation time to accomplish this. As long as the work is completed I have all the flexibility I need.
This also is one of the worst parts of my job for two reasons:
1: If you work from home, typically expectations are higher than they would be in an office setting. This usually means long days during the busy parts of the year. When your office is less than ten feet from your TV, work tends to take up more time than it probably should.
2: It took me a very long time to adjust to working from home. Think about it - it's Monday morning. You've had a very long and tiring weekend. You get up, make your coffee and head to the office. All you can think about is putting work off to get some sleep, or watch TV, etc. It takes a tremendous amount of discipline to make it work
My Career Tips
IT is a great career and is only expected to grow in the future. But to be successful as a project manager you must be successful in school first. That means going to school for both IT and business. As an IT professional it is imperative that you know the business environment that you are working with. I would suggest majoring in an IT field and minoring in business.
