College Experiences That Helped a Project Manager at Vaelynn Studios Succeed
Andreas, a Project Manager at Vaelynn Studios, learned that even with perfect execution, projects can fail due to external factors like "AWS server outages" or internal oversights. The most significant takeaway is shifting from blame—"playing the blame game"—to focusing on problem-solving and implementing changes to prevent recurrence, emphasizing a team mentality where "we need to focus on the problem, on the root cause and fix that".
Project Management, Problem-Solving, Teamwork, Resilience, Overcoming Challenges
Advizer Information
Name
Job Title
Company
Undergrad
Grad Programs
Majors
Industries
Job Functions
Traits
Andreas Lopez
Project Manager
Vaelynn Studios
Western Governor's University (WGU)
WGU Master of Business Administration (MBA)
Engineering, IT, Math & Data
Gaming
Cyber Security and IT
Pell Grant Recipient, Took Out Loans, Immigrant, Worked 20+ Hours in School, First Generation College Student
Video Highlights
1. Even with perfect planning and execution, external factors (like server outages) or internal oversights (like mismatched environment settings) can lead to project failure.
2. A significant lesson is to avoid blame games and instead focus on identifying and fixing the root cause of problems.
3. Taking responsibility, even when not directly at fault, can help the team move forward and learn from mistakes, fostering a culture of problem-solving rather than blame.
Transcript
What is one lesson you have learned that has proven significant in your career?
Sometimes you can play the perfect game and still lose. This means the team went above and beyond, perhaps even putting in overtime to deliver a project on time. If you, as a project manager, are really focusing on the plan, execution, and all the necessary steps, and everything goes well, you launch, but it still doesn't quite land.
That can be due to things outside of your control, like AWS server outages globally. If your servers host on AWS, then it's down for the day. Other scenarios can include a slight oversight in the technical code. These issues might not have been detected because the staging environment's settings were different from your production environment.
It can feel devastating because you did everything right and to your best capabilities, yet it wasn't enough. What you have to take away from that is to take a deep breath and focus on fixing the problem instead of playing the blame game.
Instead of saying, "Oh, the lead developer didn't consider the staging environments," or "The developer forgot to submit the latest code, they used an older version," or even "I, the project manager, made false assumptions, was overly positive or negative, miscalculated, or forgot to allocate a resource." For example, "Now we don't have a front-end designer because we forgot to add them to the resource plan."
It comes down to not playing the blame game. Don't just take the blame so people can move on. They might say, "No, we need to know." But the focus should be on the problem and the root cause, and fixing that.
I always encourage people to look for that and change the mentality inside the team. Trying to blame someone doesn't fix the problem. It's like, okay, cool. Let's say person X, Y caused this issue. How does that help us solve it now? It doesn't. We need to look at what the problem is and fix that.