Getting things done

"Getting things done" – easier said than done. The transition of my role from a technical/project lead to taking ownership of the PMO (Project Management Office) has brought a sea change in my job profile and responsibilities. It happened so quickly that one day I was monitoring the status of projects, resolving queries on Portfolio Management, muttering Java jargons and before I knew I was swarmed with metrics collection tasks and documents to courier – alright I’m not an administrative assistant, if that’s what you think!

The text book definition of "Project Management Office" is quite different from what I do in reality. Establishing, defining, monitoring and enforcing project management processes in an organization / project is for the guys who write books on PMO. In addition to all of this, in reality it is all about number crunching, a lot of coordination and getting things done from people. If there’s one thing I’ve learned these past 3 weeks, then it is how to be organized. All the GTD rules apply. And believe me, getting data from PMs is not easy. No amount of reminders work as walk to their cubicles.

I’ve not been much of a social person around here. This new role has got me out of my comfort zone a lil bit. The one thing I love about this job is the freedom, virtual teams, making presentations – in the style I want to and other things which I would have never got to do like reviewing contracts! On Presentations now – this time I experimented the Seth Godin / Lawrence Lessig style and was pleasantly surprised by the outcome. Quite non-conventional- black/white color schema sans bullet points and a lot of visuals to reinforce my point – it’s not the B-School ishtyle.

Categories: pmo, presentation, gtd