Project Manager For A Financial Institution
Career review from a person working in the job
How I Got The Job
My Education: AA in Business Administration
My Prior Experience: I started as a customer service representative for a large data processing firm. From there I became an account specialist, then migrated to service quality, all within the same company. I subsequently moved to a project management position in another department.
My Job Profile
My Company: My company processes financial transactions. Some examples of these are credit card transactions, prepaid transactions, and check acceptance.
Job/Career Overview: As a project manager, my duties are varied depending on the focus and scope of a particular project. One of these duties is to participate in the creation of requirements documentation. This documentation defines the scope of what we are trying to do, what changes need to be made to accomplish the goal, and things that are specifically not included as part of the project.
In my position, I am tasked with handling multiple projects at once. In many cases, each project may be in a different stage of development. This requires you to be organized and able to switch gears quickly.
Since I work in a global organization, formal in person meetings are uncommon. Most exchanges are through conference calls, email, and instant messaging. This requires attention to detail to make sure that what you are conveying is understood by all parties within the project team.
Another part of the position is to coordinate many different departments and make sure that each change they make is not adversely impacting another group. For example, there have been situations where a small name change on a report caused a very large issue in the accounting department because of a macro they used indexed on that field. Since there wasn't coordination between all of the groups for that change, there was a negative impact.
Love It? Hate It?
I rate this career 8 out of 10.
What I Love or Hate
The best part of my job is that I get to work with a large group of people and develop relationships throughout a project's life cycle. Additionally, it is very rewarding to be able to manage and implement a project successfully, on time, and on budget.
One downside to the career is that I can be placed under very tight deadlines, which makes it difficult to follow as closely to the proper process as I should. This can lead to issues later.
My Career Tips
I would suggest taking courses in project management to learn the techniques you will need in the field. This will position you into a situation where you only need to learn the specifics of the company you are working for, rather than the entire project management process.
I would also advise someone going into the project management field to learn from other people in the field. Network and find out what they have found success with and what didn't work well. Finally, I would suggest to constantly think outside of the box. There are many times where creative solutions help to make the process run more smoothly.
