Growing into an IT project management job

"You have to be able to move through politics, the complexities of how decisions are made, change control on the project as scope changes and ... you've got to influence, facilitate and sell," Kapur adds. You have to be able to present with command and stand up in front of people and deliver proposals."

In addition to technical skills, project management also requires a blend of soft skills, such as organization, efficiency and the ability to influence people. "I can find technical expertise more easily than I can find situational leaders, and project managers are situational leaders,"

Project management is a position many people segue into from other jobs within IT, such as business analyst, systems analyst or software developer, as opposed to being hired for the job at the outset of their careers, industry observers say.

IT disciplines tend to be more project-centric than other business units, and the nature of the work often requires people to come together and formulate ideas around a request from another department, says Raj Kapur, president of the Center for Project Management, a consultancy that also offers preparatory services for industry certification.

IT staffers are "high performers and very good at what they do and they have skill sets around managing projects successfully," says Kapur.

Even people who work in IT on various projects, but who do not label themselves as project managers, are finding they can evolve into the more formal role, concurs Victor Carter-Bey, director of certification at The Project Management Institute (PMI), a not-for-profit professional membership association for the project, program and portfolio management professions.

Software developers and other IT roles, including programmers and systems administrators, are the top two demographics at the institute, which has 450,000 members globally, and another 700,000 people have achieved PMI's Project Management Professional (PMP) certification, Carter-Bey says.

Veterans a great fit for project management roles

Because of their leadership, organizational and communication skills, people with military backgrounds are often good candidates for project management roles.

Nay Naing, PMP and project manager in the John Hancock Program Management Office, started his career in the military, serving as operations commander of intercontinental ballistic missiles as well as a project manager overseeing the launch campaign of a weather satellite. When he left the military he got in touch with a Hancock recruiter who was targeting junior military officers for the company's Military Acclimation Program (MAP), which was sponsored by the CIO at the time.

In the military, "We are pretty comfortable talking to leadership and reporting problems and making sure everything is ship-shape, so to speak, and that's what you want in a project manager -- someone who is not afraid to speak up and can lead a group to a resolution and can maneuver through ... politics and get your project supported," says Naing.

Today, the PMO at Hancock loans out project managers for cross-business initiatives such as one underway presently to replace legacy systems and standardize on Salesforce, he says. Project managers are typically people who are business analysts and business systems analysts. "We also have in-house developers and, eventually as they mature in their positions, they lead technical development efforts," Naing says.

A program called V.E.T.S. (Vocations, Education and Training for Service Members) helps veterans transition to the civilian workforce by training them for tech-oriented project management and other computer-related careers in a "boot camp" environment with other veterans. The program builds on the team-focused and mission-driven skills that vets already possess, says Karen Ross, CEO and founder of Sharp Decisions, a technology consulting firm. She started V.E.T.S. in 2013 in part because the unemployment rate for vets is "astronomically high," Ross explains.

Project management "is a no-brainer" for vets, who are used to managing billions of dollars' worth of equipment, Ross says. Today, she has 70 employees working for Sharp Decisions, some of whom are sent to work on projects at outside companies. "They are disciplined ... they are process oriented. It's a win for us, a win for the client, a win for the veteran."

In addition to technical skills, project management also requires a blend of soft skills, such as organization, efficiency and the ability to influence people, say both Carter-Bey and Kapur. "I can find technical expertise more easily than I can find situational leaders, and project managers are situational leaders," says Kapur, who is PMP certified.

"You have to be able to move through politics, the complexities of how decisions are made, change control on the project as scope changes and ... you've got to influence, facilitate and sell," Kapur adds. You have to be able to present with command and stand up in front of people and deliver proposals." 

Project managers are in demand. According TEKsystems' 2015 IT Forecast, project manager is the second most popular job title being sought this year.

Overall, project management is becoming more recognized as a necessary job function. Organizations waste an average of $109 million for every $1 billion invested in projects and programs because of poor performance, according to PMI's 2015 Pulse of the Profession report.

Getting there

Building a project management career requires being very organized and goal oriented, says Carter-Bey. Project managers also need to be "change agents" who can help an organization see what it will get out of a project or program at the outset, and up-front about what can and can't be done, he adds.

Building a project management career also requires "using organizational skills, time management, multitasking, communications and a thick skin. I'm working on that last one," jokes McKinney, who has a degree in psychology.

Growing into program management -- maybe

Project managers are sometimes confused with program managers, another role IT people find themselves sometimes moving into, says Jon McCombie, an IT program manager who manages the infrastructure for a big data analytics program at his company, which he did not want named. Program management is typically a bigger role because it involves multiple projects and different activities required to coordinate all of them, he says.

McCombie, who received his PMP certification, says a project is a unique set of discreet activities undertaken in a set period of time to produce a service or good. "It gets little fuzzy because there's a whole set of discrete projects" that could be outsourced or in-house, he says. A program is a set of related projects that may include development work and the operation of it, according to McCombie. When his team completes work on the Web portal it is developing, he says he will continue to have involvement and will work with a different set of people to keep it running.

"There are some project managers who like being a project manager, and that's all. They like the discrete nature of projects," he notes. "Then there are others, like me, who like to have [projects over] a longer term and broader view," and become program managers. "They start out as project managers and expand their scope."

A project manager's unexpected career

McCombie says he "never even remotely considered" project or program management after college. He got a degree in computer science and expected to become a software developer, which he did for the first few years of his career. Eventually he took on a software support role and began managing small IT projects.

"I didn't particularly like software support, but when we did business process analysis I was the project manager for IT in understanding what [the business] wanted," he says. McCombie landed a job in technical project management and became a liaison between developers and customers, helping to interpret requirements and keep developers on track.

"I was the one who got yelled at when we went over budget, if we went over budget," he recalls. "At that point in my career I had gotten away from writing code and I had been bitten by the project management bug."

The combination of skills required

Echoing Kapur and Carter-Bey, McCombie says a good project manager has a combination of people and technical skills. "You have to be assertive without being aggressive; you have to be a good planner and methodical thinker, you have to be an outstanding listener." Technical skills include knowing how to create a Gantt chart and being comfortable with basic algebra, he says.

"You need to be able to look at the big picture and look at the forest and not get lost looking at the trees," he says. "You need to know how to manage up as well as down." Other requirements include the ability to be a good communicator and being persistent, he adds. Like McKinney, he says, "You have to have thick skin, because inevitably things are going to go wrong ... conflict is the nature of this game."

Many organizations are starting to recognize the importance of creating project management offices (PMOs), says Ann, a project manager within a PMO at a large insurance company in Boston, who asked that only her first name be used. PMOs are often formed to create standards around the project management process within an organization, according to Ann. The PMO defines the process and what documentation is required as part of a project. Sometimes the group creates the templates that will be used on an ongoing basis within the organization for projects such as a project charter, requirements, test plans, status reports, etc. The group also usually provides project managers for selected projects as needed, she says.

Ann came out of school with a degree in electrical engineering and computer science and started working as a developer at Accenture, and then became a systems analyst and eventually a project manager.

"I found that I'm good at being a project manager," Ann says, because she pays attention to detail and is persistent. "You also have to be a bit of a nag."