The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - How to Transition from another Profession into Project Management

Episode Date: October 4, 2020

In How to Transition from another Profession into Project Management | PPP #53 I share how I mapped my skills as a Local Health Emergency Coordinator, EMS Planning Captain and Planning Section Chief to the traditional Project Management Institute (PMI) Project Management Knowledge.

As of October 2020, many people throughout this year have lost their jobs. Many people throughout this year are changing jobs. Maybe they're going from one industry to another. Maybe they're going from what in title was a higher ranking position to another. But a challenge that I have been asked about and that people are facing is, how do I show that I have this experience that equals that experience in another career field? And in particular, how do I map my skills from another industry to project management? Well, in this episode 53, you're a project manager and you don't know it

yet. I'm going to walk you through by using examples from my time in public safety, public health, and all hazards and incident management. So my background in the past, gosh, decade now was in January 2010, I started as a local public health emergency coordinator. So that means I planned for work with public safety, local partners, everybody else funded by the CDC to plan for pandemics, outbreaks, all sorts of things, mass casualties. So I've mentioned that I mentioned that as relates to COVID. So for me, a significant project I was involved in in that time period was revising our entire emergency

operations plan. So going from this huge document with a bunch of words that fit the standard to making an operationally usable SOP. And if you've written plans before, whether it's for project management or emergency management, you know the difference between a big plan that you have to do to check the box to say you have it and a plan you can pick up and actually use. So what I did with the approval of my leadership was make it usable plans, which was really good. So that's one of the examples. I was then an EMS captain where we did this thing called shift bids. So every year based on performance and seniority, you got to choose the shift that you wanted to work. You know, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, whatever, 12 hour shifts, eights,

however we chopped it up. So we did a shift bid based on that combination. It was at one point, all seniority based. So you can imagine if you're the new person, you never get a chance to get a good shift, which you know, in public safety comes with the territory, some instances. Fortunately, we kind of evolved that. And with some great mentors I had in how you do system status management and shift bid and manage the project, we said, hey, let's mix in people's performance. How long are you at the hospital? How long does it take for you to respond?

Do you have any disciplinary action? So a more comprehensive look at how we do that. So I'll talk through how we added that into or how I equated that to project work. Right. And then when we put together the project to train over a thousand public safety folks in the city on active threat training. So primarily active shooter. But again, as we know, it could be a truck, a knife, an axe, whatever.

How we did that. I was involved in this huge event, the UCI Road World Championships in 2015, a huge bike race, enormous staff, and I'll walk through that kind of stuff there, marathons, the vice presidential debate in 2016. And then when I got into emergency management at the state level, not just public health, but comprehensive, looking at implementing software, right? So as I step toward officially doing IT project management or project management, one of the last projects I did in the emergency management field was implementing software and rolling it out throughout a whole region. What I really hope to provide here is not like, hey, look how cool this stuff is, even though to be a part of these things

was awesome. It's how you can take seemingly unaffiliated skills in different fields and say, well, how does this equate to project management proper, if you will, right? And so I know there's folks that look at, there's a lot of people new into the industry or leaving, you know, a retirement job, and they're getting into project management. If you can lead teams, if you can communicate, if you can coordinate resources, you know, that's a huge chunk, remember the whole foundational four thing, if you can get people together to make objectives, put together a good team org structure, coordinate those resources and communicate, you can respond to incidents, or you can manage and support projects, right?

And there's more to it than that. But that's our breakdown, right? And if you get leaders intent, that foundational fifth, that that's huge, and you have that guidance. So let's talk about emergency operations plan revision project, right? So again, this is from what I submitted to the Project Management Institute. So I had this whole project, I met with stakeholders, right? So everyone that owned any piece, any annex of this plan were my stakeholders. So here's my project work summary. As the lead project manager, I built the business case for the rewrite and workflow changes in the locality public health operations plan.

So when I say the business case for the rewrite and workflow changes, right? So when you do a project, it's something new that meets a certain amount of money. So the business case was we have a big plan that is hard to use if someone picks it up and they've never been involved in it. So my thought and experience and with feedback of others is let's make it more actionable, right? So that's the business case. That's like if a business, an IT, a hospital, a telecom company, whoever says, hey, we have this workflow that's not working. We need this new product. We need to get more efficient. You write it up, right? And you pitch it and you do that. And it's a rewrite. And it's a workflow change, which is often a project is we

have a workflow, it's not efficient, particularly when you look at Six Sigma stuff, right? And you'll look at efficiency and performance improvement, those kind of things. Here's the second sentence initiated the project with the sponsor, who was the health director, planned the schedule and workflow tasks, right? There's our planning phase for the waterfall for the PMI, executed changes and coordinated iterative plan and process changes, and close the project with final review from subject matter experts and the sponsor. So what did I do? We had this plan, it's big, who owns different pieces of it, we have the women, infants and

children, the WIC. We have the clinical folks. We have the epidemiology. We have the emergency part. We have the leadership administrative part, right? Just like in a project. So in an IT project, you have networking and security and your sponsor and your business owner, your application owner. Basically, if you start the project, you initiate it. If you do planning towards it, make a schedule and workflow tasks. And whether you're using Microsoft Project or at the project, you initiate it. If you do planning towards it, make a schedule and workflow tasks. And you know, whether you're using Microsoft Project, or at the time, I was using an Excel spreadsheet that had a Gantt chart, pretty handy. If you make the changes, you execute them, right. And if you coordinate them in an iterative fashion, meaning you make changes and suggestions,

you give them to the person, they review it, they give them back, you make changes, you give them back, and then they sign off, you're iterating, right? And you close it when you get final approval on all the annexes, pull them back together, and do your one final plan, right? And in doing so, I was fortunate that other folks thought it was a pretty good outcome and idea, and it was a best practice in one of the symposiums we did in 2012 for public health. So, you know, you can see there, there are words, the phases of waterfall for PMI, right? For a standard PMI project, or you initiate it, you plan it, you execute it, you monitor and control it, which I didn't really

put in there, and then you close it. So if you can think about experiences you've done, let's say you were tasked with, which this is stuff I've heard of. Let's say you work for a fire department and you're tasked with redesigning or planning for new furniture, new space, make our space more efficient, right? You're going to initiate it based on being chosen to do it and starting the project and going out for bids and looking at plans. You're going to do planning maybe with your planning department, with furniture suppliers. You're going to execute the changes, right? By working with whoever's going to get all the old stuff out by working with the people you work with to box their things up to get them ready to move. And then you're going to close it when everybody's in their new space, they're settled in,

and then you're going to have operational support ongoing by people that you know, are going to call for help with their phones or their computers or something like that. So think about just the basics of what you do every day in your job, whether it's you're in another business, you know, private industry, or whether in the public sector, like public safety or public health, you are doing project management. And this one emergency operations plan revision is very similar to that. Just think about and I would if you haven't, and you're interested in project management, go to the PMI.org website and look at the PMP process or the other processes just to get a sense of what it looks like and how you document your

experience because they have great guidance on the fact that you don't have to be the lead project manager. You could be a coordinator or a manager of a certain part of it or something like that. So don't think that you have to have been in charge of all these projects all the time to be able to get your PMP or to even be a good project manager. So again, I've said many times here, I've posted it on Reddit, on LinkedIn, your credential doesn't make you a good project manager. It just so happens the PMI framework is verbiage that's used a lot as well, right? And it's a good credential to get once you're experienced.

And it says, hey, I went through this process, I'm credentialed, internationally recognized. So it's good to have. But again, it doesn't equate to being a good project manager. But if you've done good work, that's similar to project management, then you probably will be. So something to think about. So the shift bid process, this thing where I talked about by seniority, which is pretty heavy, and by experience and performance. EMS providers could, once a year, try and get a different shift, a better shift, keep their old shift if they wanted it for however long they were going to be there. So basically what we did is we pulled everybody's numbers,

we put them on this super advanced spreadsheet. I'm pretty good at Excel, but one of my colleagues, who's also one of the officers there, actually, I think he has an ALX degree. Fantastic job, right? And so what he did is put this whole spreadsheet together with formulas. We plugged in numbers. It showed us who kind of shook out where, plus seniority points. And then that's the order we went with.

It's a pretty cool system. And I think pretty fair, right? And sometimes people think it's not fair, especially when you've changed perhaps from a pure seniority to a seniority plus performance and people don't just get what they've gotten. That's one of the mantles of leadership too, right? When you even the playing field based on maybe how something's been done for a while,

not everybody's gonna like it, right? Not everybody likes change. So the gist is you pull data, you do this, you've done evals with these folks, you've talked to people, you, you, I mean, imagine if you're in public safety, or even you're doing shift work, you get the chance to choose what you're going to work. That's pretty legit, right? Especially in public safety. So oftentimes you don't get that choice, especially if you're newer. So here's how I summarize that. So I coordinated multi level work group, perform data analysis, right, you're looking at a bunch of data, created EMS system level schedules for over 200 providers, received

stakeholder review and approval, right? So you pull all this data, you put schedules together, because the big another huge part of this, particularly in EMS is work life balance, people will work a lot if they're not making a lot, to get more money, right? Because they love it for all different reasons. But you as a leader also have to not let them get burnt out. So there's a safety component and a life thing. And so you gather all this, you put it together, you say, hey, here's a shift that I think will work, it'll cover the demand.

And then you have to get sign-off from leadership, right? And these are folks that have been in the industry that know what's going on, hey, these shifts don't quite cover it, if there's a peak, it might, we might be understaffed. And part of this is, is a little magic and a little science, right when you're doing EMS shift bed. But if you're project managing, you are looking at that data quite a bit, just like you do in other projects. You participate in a murder board, we call it. So essentially, you go sell what you think is going to work and people try and punch holes in it. So be ready to

sell it. Just like if you put together a project management plan or a scope, a document that has your schedule and your budget and who's who on the team and what are the key performance indicators, that all has to get approved by the sponsor and other project leadership. So this shows if you've done similar work by doing shifts in public safety or incident management for big incidents that you have then put those together, analyze things. Then you've gotten an approval. So you're used to presenting things to leadership, right? Looking at a benefit cost ratio, non-functional consideration, meaning that work-life thing during project selection and closeout, right? Looking at a benefit cost ratio, non-functional consideration, meaning that work-life thing during project selection and closeout, right? So once it's approved,

you get everybody to do their shift bid. You say, okay, it's set. Everybody's, you know, not everybody's going to be good to go, but from a project standpoint, at some point it's over. Everybody's chosen, the shifts are covered, and now we're going to start the new schedule on whatever date. So imagine you just put in a new piece of software. While you're doing that, you evaluated old systems, this new systems, you did builds, you had it tested, you did training, you put it in. Now you're in operational support. And now, boom, that's it.

There's a go live date, which is like your start new shift date. And that's an equivalent, right? So that's a pretty straightforward thing. Again, we're pulling people together. We're looking at some data, we are getting approval from leadership, if you can show you're doing that in whatever industry you're coming from, then that's a huge help. So these first two examples have helped you think in whatever industry, how do I think about what I've done? And how do I equate that to again, these standard project management practices. So you got to look up those project management practices if you're trying to break into the

field officially, right, and get used to those and then equate it. It's just like if you're going to write a good job application or a good cover letter, you should have looked at the posting to put some of the verbiage from the posting in your application and cover letter, right, to see that you met those. It's no different. And when you apply to PMI or just as an exercise to really get a feel for what experience do I have

that fit these various positions. So this next example, I was still an EMS captain, planning section chief on the all-hazard management team and did some field work every now and then as an EMT when the system needed it or just getting cleared like the other folks. Again, do what you expect your folks to do. And so this one was doing that active threat

training for all the public safety folks in the city. And so I was helped get it started, managed the project. And then I had left this position before it was completely done. I think we'd gotten through about 700 folks trained. So what does that mean for locality, right, or city, where you're going to pull different agencies together and you're going to say, hey, we should probably all get, this was an awareness level training, right? So this was a PowerPoint presentation, discussion, Q&A, best practice between what the dispatchers can do,

what does police do, what does fire do, what does EMS do. And then if we put all that together in an all hazard incident management org and teamwork, what should it look like in an ideal world? Let's work toward that. Again, ground truth is different when stuff happens. And then operationally, we were also doing tactical combat casualty care training on the job, all that kind of stuff. But this awareness level training at least gets folks knowledge that 911, you know, where we were can, you know, if the news keeps calling, say, here's a standard statement twice, I'm hanging up or call the PIO or whatever. So you're not getting hammered with stuff. So, again, this is you're talking about executive leaders with chiefs and then city leaders.

And then you're talking about executive leaders with chiefs and then city leaders. And then you're talking about your leadership, right? So internally getting permission first, making the case, putting together curriculum or a project plan, and then selling it to the leadership to say, Hey, we want to pull time. We want to pull people out of shifts or when they're on shift, right? You're moving hundreds of people throughout a locality. Just like if you're in a business and you want to, or you're approved to lead a project,

you're going to put all that stuff together and it's going to affect hundreds of people potentially, or even if it affects 20 people. So my example here is that I performed most of the work in the initiation and planning process groups executed by providing training to over 600 city public safety personnel. And so my piece of this was often I taught the EMS part and triage treatment and transport,

basically what we're going to do there. And then the incident management part. And then I worked police taught police stuff, fire taught fire stuff. Number one dispatch leaders taught that. And that's how it should be, right? Just like on a project, if I need an expert in networking, I want the networking person to tell me about it if we need integrations i want them to tell me and on and on so that's what we did so you gathered your resources is what i said there and got them to do the training we monitored and controlled by tracking class attendance by organization and discipline we scheduled instructors and sessions so what i did throughout there is as folks attended we had a sign-in sheet then i would take the sign in sheet, put it in a spreadsheet, we could see by police fire

EMS 911, who attended, when did they attend, we could spit out a nice graph, send it weekly, right? In projects, you do the same exact thing, right? You're pulling together the project, you're doing build, you're testing your reporting status. And then you're sharing it. If you can do that in a great bottom line up front, like a graph with some bullets to leadership, because they're not going to read pages of updates, they're not going to go to systems they don't go to all the time, then that's super helpful. We did scheduling for instructors. So again, that's a huge project component. And we kept the stakeholders informed with those updates, right? And then I left before closeout, but that happens on projects too, right?

Let's say you're on a project or you're doing work and you get pulled to do some other work. In the project management world, that's going to happen. Sometimes there's projects you start, you get them going, they're going well, you're helping things move along, and then you are needed somewhere else and you get pulled there or there's somebody else that maybe is a better fit. Either way that it works out.

So, again, think about in this example, I think the standout is if you're working with executive level folks now in a non kind of air quote standard project management position. That's like working with the leaders of an organization or your sponsor. Sponsors are typically executive level folks in organizations or high level for whatever organization you're in. And so that translates to there is a difference in talking to folks that you work with every day at the ground level than there is to talking to leadership. Sometimes there's not, but often there is, right? Because the scope of time that they have is way smaller because they have so much more scope and responsibility at the C-suite level that you have to be practiced in preparing and delivering succinct messages and updates. And then if there's no action for them,

then getting out and that's it. And so we actually had to present that active threat training to the leadership of the city in the boardroom and get sign off. And the other thing is it helps you get used to talking with leadership. If you do it now, then you're going to be able to do that as a project manager, which is a skill. Why get nervous, right? There are other people that have big positions and jobs, but they're people, right? And for me, I've been fortunate between the time I was in the Navy talking to high level leadership through now, I've had a lot of exposure to high level people. And that's a good thing. So if you can do that, where you are now get in front of folks at time with leadership, reach out to them, get that high level mentorship, then when you are in project management, you'll be even more used to it. So this next example was really a watershed moment

for the Central Virginia region that that I in and the team that I was on. And it was the UCI Rogue World Championships in 2015. This was the first time fully the region came together as one giant incident management team to host this huge regional event that may never happen again in Richmond. So once in a lifetime opportunity, we operated as a type one or national level team, even though most of us or all of us came from type three regional teams, which was great. And in this one, this is another example or an example of, I mentioned, you don't have to have been the lead. And I wasn't. So I was a resource unit leader within the planning section. And I rotated one day where I was the planning section chief, but primarily I was not. I was like a deputy. So I was like a project coordinator to the project manager paired up there. And so for me as a resource unit leader, the resource unit

leader job for folks that aren't in public safety or incident management is it was to track and account for all of our public safety people. So a super high priority, as I've said here on the podcast before, accountability is number one to make sure we know where our people are, that they're safe. I had fantastic people on the team, which, as we know, is why teams work, right? Even though there's the, you know, Jocko and Leif and Extreme Ownership, no bad teams, only bad leaders.

And that's true. And this is the example, if you've listened to earlier podcasts, where I talk about, I did mess up and I didn't give enough supervision to help optimize the way we were doing some throughput. So great lesson learned from me, right? So my summary here from this was, I worked as the resource unit leader within a multidisciplinary organizational structure

that consisted of local, regional, state, and federal partners, right? So think about that from a standpoint of what, in the industry, I was in public safety, then I was still an U.S. captain, but working in incident management, but that to me as a project manager says, hey, I was whatever this position is, which I don't, say I don't know as a project manager without the background I have, but I know I worked in a multidisciplinary organizational structure that was made up of local, regional, state, and federal partners, right? So I know that was multiple levels of people, multiple organizations and logos, if you will, right? Working together. And I was within it, right? So I wasn't the lead. I provided planning through creation of a new process to check in first responders.

So I helped kind of optimize how we do that. And we gave them GPS and we tracked them and it was all that. So I say, hey, I helped make this new process and put it together. I executed through assignment of specific unit designations with functional managers, provided accountability for over 7,000 people over nine days. And I closed it by demobilizing all the responders safely. Right? So again, we're walking the reader through our experience that isn't day-to-day it healthcare business banking project management experience, but just in that statement from your public safety or all hazards or public health experience, you're saying I was in this multidisciplinary org with all these different levels. I made new processes. I made new specifications.

I accounted for over 7,000 people over nine days, a multi-day project, right? And then we demobilized everyone safely. So you don't have to know public safety. I don't have to know your field particularly as a project manager. Maybe it was a hiring project manager to know, wow, you did some pretty significant organization and project management. So I think the overall theme you get, so you have to think about, and how can you frame the actions you've taken in whatever industry you're in? And again, I'm using mine as an example, public safety, public health, all-housing

management. But how can you frame that in the PMI phases? Just because they're, honestly, they're the easiest to map to as opposed to like Agile or Six Sigma or something like that. But if you can map what you've done to, if you started something, you've initiated it. If you were involved in a process, you planned. If you did or supervised those that did or a mix of those, you executed something, right? If you've set things in motion

and you're tracking how that's going and you're monitoring and controlling. And then if you brought that to a close and sent everybody home, you've closed a project. So I'll just do one more example because I don't want to just read all these to you, even though I kind of have. And again, I hope you can hear the theme of this, right? It's really, you need to take time if you're moving sectors, if you want to move sectors, positions, et cetera, particularly in the project management and think about list out what you do now or what you've done with your various positions or projects or special events you've been part of, and then look at the PMI kind of, kind of phases. And you could look at the process group table. So if you don't know what that is, and you want to get into project management, Google PMI process group table, you get this whole table of kind of things

and do a little more, you got to put a little into it, right? There's no magic credential that's going to get into project management to do well. And again, there's a difference. And you got to put the research in. So this last one is, again, I was not in charge, I was a documentation unit leader, right? So very administrative. So if you do very administrative work, this is a great translation example. So this was for the vice presidential debate in 2016 at Longwood College, which was pretty awesome. And again, the documentation unit leader.

So what that is for all hazardous incident management is a lot of it is what it sounds like. I made sure the final incident action plan or project management plan was ready. If there were edits, I made them, you know, pen and ink on the day we already print it, just like a project plan. As soon as you get it, you know, electronically, you can change it a little bit. And then I helped the file system keep people's documents basically make kind of a legal record that we kept with them. So here's how I said, you know, I project manager was part of that for that event. So I

said work as the documentation unit leader within the planning section, parenthesis PMO project management office equivalent, right? Again, I'm mapping what I did in my world to how that goes in the project management world. And there are direct correlations like nobody's business. So the planning section is the project management office for the incident management team. Right? That's a pretty succinct statement. And I maintain accurate, complete, and up-to-date incident files. Right?

So administratively, I did these things. So as a project manager, you do a ton of administrative work. Right? You do Microsoft project schedules, meeting notes, project reports, set up meetings and outlook or whatever email thing. So you do tons of administrative stuff and keep files. So show that you know how to do that. I assisted in the compilation, reproduction and distribution of the incident action plan, parentheses, equivalent to the charter and project management plan. Again, I'm going to tell you what this means if you don't know. So if you're putting together your project work summary for your PMI application for your PMP, or you're just putting

together a list of what have I done that equates to project management, right? Then do that. And that's very helpful to do that. I followed, and here's something we've covered recently. I followed the primary alternate contingency and, or PACE planning model and created contingency plans with focus on 17 different natural or man-made response scenarios. So PACE planning actually we covered a little bit ago, but this has to do with the contingency planning. And we've covered that here. We took basically whole planning sessions where we focused on contingency plans.

What if a car came on the course? What if there was a storm? Or all these different scenarios, natural, man-made, and then put them into a checklist. So because I had experience in that, I also worked on that with the folks that were at Longwood and helped put those together. But largely, what I'm saying here

and what you could say if you have a strong administrative background is, look, I know how to maintain records. I know how to prepare or participate in the preparation of plans, these big project management plans. And I know how to plan for what we think we're going to do, our backup plans, and be part of that, and look at different scenarios and help determine what we do. So I hope what you all do is continue to listen to the show to reach out to me people

process progress at gmail.com. Stop by people process progress.com. All my contacts are there. There's past episodes, I need to put some newer episodes up there or the more recent ones. And feel free to reach out to me like I mentioned the email address and all my contacts are on their social media. And I hope that if you're out there looking for something new, if you just want to change, really give yourself credit for the work that you've done. You can map being a stay-at-home mom or dad. You can map being a plumber that schedules their own projects. You can map public safety stuff. Anything maps to project management, because essentially all the work we do as a project, right? It starts with an idea

that we do or don't want to do. We do or don't get approved. We have to figure out how to fund it, how to get the stuff to do it with, where we're going to do it, what the schedule is, how often, how fast we can do it, how slow do we have the staff to do it? Is it a one man or woman job? Then we are going to start working on it or executing it. We're going to see how we're doing. We're going to get feedback from our customer, from ourselves, if we're building a tree house, from our spouse, if we're screwing it up. And then at some point it's going to end and we're going to close it. And it really is that simple. All the wrenches that get thrown in, all the quirks, all the challenges are from us or others or a pandemic or, you know,

outside influences, but you can really look at a project that simply, right? You can really break it out that way and then plug in the tools you use. So again, give yourself credit. Look at what you do. If you're interested in project management, you got to put some time in and learn about project management. And then you have to be able to actually do what you say you're going to do or what you say you've done, right? So, but it's a great exercise to do. I highly recommend it, whether you're going to go down the road of credentialing or not. If you want to break into the project management field, you got to see the skills that you think you have or or you know you have, and you got to show those because you can

also use this list that you're going to make these equivalent lists for job applications for when you reach out to someone to talk to them and say, Hey, what's this like? So again, feel free to reach out to me people progress process progress.com. I thank you so much for listening for all the support. Again, big milestone. We hit over 10,000 downloads over the past week. Um, that was my original milestone when I started podcasting and you all have made that happen and I'm so appreciative of it. So until we meet again and podcast land, please stay safe. Please certainly wash your hands and Godspeed to you all.