My path to Project Management

In the next in our series of careers blogs, Kainos' Laura Clatworthy invites you to take a look into the world of a Project Manager (PM), working on world-changing projects as part of our Digital Services team. I'm currently working in Kainos as a Project Manager, and I'll start by explaining how I got here. I was working as a BA at the time and was asked if I could do a team lead role for a project at a global re-insurance firm for a few weeks. It turned into a two year PM role - and I loved it. At the time I was particularly interested in the change from traditional waterfall to more agile methodologies and the philosophy that it brings too. More self-organising, empowered teams; less micro management. I enjoyed shaping the team and it brought benefits to the customer too. Similar for a lot of managers in Kainos, I joined as a developer. Over the years, I progressed to PM via a bit of business analysis. I loved all roles and still bring out my (now basic) coding skills for fun at hackathons. Even now, I'm learning something new every day from my talented team, whether it's a new technology or new way of doing things. I've also enjoyed working in many different industries and customer styles, and have always worked on client site, with Kainos to lean on in the background. The biggest reward in my role is seeing people use the services I work on. It's been the same for every role in my career, and I still get a buzz from it. As a PM, I have the freedom to be creative and allow other people to experiment with their own ideas. Of course with this as in any other role, there are challenges. The responsibility of the role means the buck stops with you, and it's your job to make things right if things go wrong. It's really pushed me and helped me to grow as a manager, and I feel like I can now face anything and win! Kainos has really supported me throughout my career here. They offer training courses and the chance to go on conferences to network and find out what's new to learn from other people. There's an emphasis on managing your own career with the support of a coach, and because Kainos is expanding, there's plenty of opportunity for the taking.   We support ourselves, spinning up groups in Slack to share information as we're now quite a distributed bunch of managers across many accounts and many locations. We have quarterly face to face meet ups for deeper discussions. Overall, we love to communicate, and this helps you to feel connected when you're offsite like many of us are. There are so many highlights of my time working at Kainos. Leading a team of 100 people in eight scrum teams - that was an exciting challenge and I was supported by brilliant people around me that I could trust to do the right thing. I also loved living in Gdansk for a year when we first opened an office there. It was 15 people when I joined, and they're now 200 strong. It's a fantastic place to visit at any time of the year. Want to join our team and work alongside people like Laura working to make public services smarter, faster, better? Apply for one of our current vacancies here.