First, A Little History

Several years ago I decided to become a computer programmer. After completing my bachelors degree with a minor in computer information systems, the Air Force in its infinite wisdom determined that I could, really could, be a computer programmer. After commissioning training at Lackland Air Force Base (AFB) in San Antonio Texas, I traveled to Mississippi for 12 intense weeks of in-residence, 8 hours a day, computer programmer training.

Then I was sent to the AWACS Wing, now the 552 Air Control Wing at Tinker AFB, near Oklahoma City Oklahoma. There I quickly learned that while I enjoyed programming, it wasn't quite the same in the work world as it was with friends and my brother. These people were socially deranged...well, not really, but they were almost to a person unwilling to share their knowledge. I don't know about you, but I don't care for working like that. I believe we accomplish much more when we share amongst ourselves. If you don't think that way, consider not reading any further - I'll probably just piss you off!

So roughly two years after going into programming, with some database administration thrown in for good measure, I was offered an opportunity to become a project manager in a newly created section. And so began my project management career. Working with several others we began building a project process. I located a couple of pages of code in a computer magazine and we built our first project schedule software on a CPM mini computer. This is pre-MS Project, pre-Primavera, pre-Timeline even. We were glad to have it. We tweaked this program until it squeaked and until it gave us what we needed - particularly a critical path.

After that assignment, I was in and out of project management at the whim of the United States Air Force until 2001 when I certified as a Project Management Professional (PMP) through the Project Management Institute (PMI) and also became the contract project manager for the USAF Surgeon General's Web Development Team at Brooks AFB Texas.

At Brooks we "webified" (that's what the docs called it) medical databases for teams that were scattered to worldwide locations, to enhance collaboration on research efforts within the Air Force medical research community. Entomology, lasik surgery, even construction and maintenance of medical facilities - whatever the General wanted, we produced it.

Following that I went to work at USAA, a superb financial services association serving the military community and of which I am a member. USAA has a very robust project management discipline. I learned a great deal there, and after something close to five years headed out for greener pastures. While there though, I worked primarily with IT infrastructure projects, bringing in the first ever enterprise-wide desktop performance tool. Three other projects stand out as favorites in my mind.

The first was a Websphere upgrade where we not only came in on time and on budget, but we built a process that was followed in later Websphere upgrades. Two patent applications were generated from that process also. That was pretty exciting.

The next two projects were related in that they both involved the financial application, Fidelity. First, measures were taken to determine the capacity of the mainframe needed to handle the transaction load several years into the future, then we began the work of extracting the application and all of our bank's data into our local data center and backed it up in a hot-swap environment in our High Availability Data Center. It was much more complex than it sounds here, believe me! Then we took on the second project, in which we swapped out Fidelity-standard utilities surrounding the application with USAA-standard utilities. Because Fidelity really "is the bank", not just another program, you can imagine the work and security required on this. Each of these projects ran several millions of dollars, with the total price tag in the teens. It took roughly two years to plan, validate, execute, test, and implement these two projects. I had great teams working with me with much overlap from one to the other, and they simply made it happen.

After USAA, I moved on to Commercial Metals Company, an international metals company dealing in steel mills, metal recycling sites, and other metals commodity related industries. As I discuss some of my projects in "Current Work", you'll see the wide range of work we do. It is very early in the history of the Portfolio and Project Management Office at CMC, so we have some growing and corporate-wide learning to do. I hope it helps new project managers and seasoned ones as well. I really hope it helps those not in the project management profession understand what we do and why.