Leo, a senior project manager at U. C. L. A in their strategic communications department, worked in marketing and communications for my career. I started out as more of a graphic designer. That was one of things I studied in school. But as time went on and Technologies were really changing, there were a lot of opportunities to move mawr into other types of roles. So, for example, when I was in college, there was not as much about website design or there were no think things as iPads or iPhones. At that point, Social Media was just starting to come out. And so when I was beginning my career and these new technologies were coming out, there were opportunities to learn about them and to shift my work into those areas. So, for example, I started doing more digital marketing and Web design, and that opened up further opportunities to take on other rules within marketing teams. So that's how I got to where I am now. As a project manager, I'm helping to facilitate that type of work. So having some of the background in the the execution of these marketing deliver a bles or these areas of expertise. I'm able to understand what the work and walls and I can help plan out the work, figure out what resources we need, how long it might take and so on. So that's kind of how I became more of a project manager and then as part of that process. In addition to learning in the job while actually doing project management, I was also working on more of a formal education in that area, so taking courses on project management and eventually earning my project management professional certification.

As a project manager, you often find yourself taking on a lot of different roles and responsibilities that may not normally fall under what you think of project management. Of course, there are things like breaking down the work. So if you have a large job, deliver verbal like a whole website, what are the steps that need to be done in order to get to that point where you're launching a website on, then figuring out a schedule and the resource is who's going to do what? When to take us down this path? Um, there's budget involved. So if you're especially, if you're hiring outside resource is how much money do we have to work with? What will that cover? How can we plan to use it over a period of time? And of course, um making sure that things are moving Azaz planned? I think some of the things that come into play that aren't necessarily what you immediately think of project management would be things like people management, really understanding your team members as human beings and, understanding what their needs and motivations are and working with them to really, make sure that they have what they need to get their work done supporting them along the way and facilitating decision making. So within a project you have all these different opinions or backgrounds, and so folks on the team may not be an agreement. And so you want Teoh as a project manager, you want to help them reach those decisions so that they I know what they want to do and how to proceed forward. Um, and so those are some of the things that come into play on a regular basis that may not be inherently thought of being in project management, so your role is really about problem solving. So how do you how remove obstacles along the way, whether it's a capacity issue or money or a technology that someone's needs? Or there's a disagreement that needs to be resolved. The project managers responsible for alleviating those issues to help that work move forward in my current role during Cove in 19 were working from home, which is different. Normally, we would go into the office our work hours about 40 hours a week. Um, though every organization is different, and certainly there might be times where there's a project that's nearing a deadline and your all on board trying to wrap it up and get it done. But normally my commute is about 45 minutes each way. I live in Los Angeles, California so there's a lot of traffic. Um, right now I'm not experiencing said traffic, so it's a little bit different, but, uh, that is something to take into consideration. Just any metro area, a 1,000,000 Paul commute. I think that there are increasingly opportunities to do this kind of work remotely from a home office or coworking space. Eso. It kind of depends on the organization, and and you know what? What those options are?

There's a project management information system, which serves as a, um, a source of truth for all project work. So some examples of the work front base camp asana There's a lot of different tools available out there. Um, Ghira is common for software development, So in my day to day I use their table, which is a relational database tool that we need built out into a project management system. And I also used Ghira for our digital projects. Eso these These tools are fairly similar. They might have some nuances in terms of how things are organized your name, but overall, they're breaking down the work into from the large chunks. The large projects there deliverables into smaller projects there, facilitating assignments there, facilitating project status updates so folks can understand where they are at any given time. Whether there I worked on or, um, they're in review or they're going back for some revisions or if they're approved and ready to go eso those air very common for project managers to use, and they really help facilitate the work and also help the individual contributors that are on the project team understand what's coming up for them. help them communicate with the project managers and the other team members a swell as their managers or supervisors to help understand what 13 is working on eso those air. Those are the most common tools that project managers would use. Um, we also might be involved in some reporting. So some project managers need to be able to use Excel files and manipulate data, maybe show some charts to show how work has been progressing or, um, highlight any areas that need attention. Eso Some of those kinds of things are built into project management tools, and then other times you might just be using spreadsheets like Excel or Google Sheets really kind of depends on what tools you have available to you.