Entry-Level Positions For Aspiring Project Managers
Andreas, a project manager at Vaelynn Studios, shared a crucial lesson learned: "sometimes you can play the perfect game and still lose," due to factors outside their control, like server outages or unforeseen technical issues. The key takeaway is to shift from blame to problem-solving, focusing on "the root cause and fix that," rather than dwelling on individual mistakes.
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 AWS outages) or internal oversights (like code issues or mismatched settings between environments) can lead to project failure. It's crucial to focus on problem-solving and fixing issues rather than assigning blame.
2. A significant lesson learned is the importance of a positive team mentality focused on problem-solving rather than blame. When issues arise, the priority should be identifying the root cause and implementing solutions, not pointing fingers.
3. Entry-level positions may not always be explicitly advertised. Actively seeking out opportunities and networking can lead to success. The speaker emphasizes the importance of not being afraid to take on challenges and learn from mistakes.
Transcript
What is one lesson that 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, the execution, and all the necessary steps, and everything goes well, you launch, and it still doesn't quite land, that can be due to things outside of your control.
For instance, there could be global AWS server outages. If your servers are hosted on AWS, this would mean they are down for the day. Other scenarios might include a slight oversight in the technical code that wasn't detected. This can happen because the staging environment's settings were different from the production environment.
It can feel devastating when you've done everything right, to the best of your capabilities, and it still wasn't enough. What you have to take away from that, or what I took away, is that you have to take a deep breath and focus on fixing the problem.
This is instead of trying to play the blame game, like blaming the lead developer for not considering the staging environment settings, or a developer forgetting to submit the latest code and using an older version. Even the project manager might have made false assumptions, been overly positive or negative, or completely miscalculated or forgotten certain aspects of the project.
This could be forgetting to allocate a resource, like realizing you don't have a front-end designer because they weren't included in the resource plan. Ultimately, it comes down to not playing the blame game.
Instead of just taking the blame so people can move on, you need to focus on the problem and the root cause. We need to fix that.
I always encourage people to look for that and change the mentality inside the team instead of trying to blame someone. Blaming doesn't fix the problem.
For example, if person X caused an issue, how does knowing that help us solve it now? It doesn't. We need to look at what the problem is and fix that.