How This Project Manager Revived Team Morale and Secured $7 Million Through Strategic Migration

All right, so this was a um I'd love to tell you about a situation again in the current role I have it as project manager at IHS Market. We were facing a large migration of virtual machines, and the previous program manager had been let go from the company. So the effort was stalled, the effort to migrate these 900 VMs in one of our data centers had been planned for about a year, but then the previous PM was let go from the company and I was assigned the role. So my job was to go in there, complete the migrations both for non-profit and production environments, but what I encountered right away was a team that was not demoralized, but a little bit at sea. That is, um, they had done all this work and were ready to do their thing and show their goodness, um, but their leader had been let go. And they wanted to finish the work and move on to other things. So what I did is I quickly challenged them to complete the migration of the early non-prod environments in rapid fashion. So within two weeks of coming into the role after checking to make sure that everyone knew what they were doing and had their stuff set up, I, I put out the communications that had been lacking before to all the customers and products, and we went ahead and pick, picked a weekend and we performed the migration, and it was a success. Now, we still had production to go and uh I'll do that production migration on December 5th, you know, just a couple of short weeks. Um, but what, what I did was I showed the team that their work was important, and I did that by telling them how moving these products and services VMs set these products and services up for further migration into our software defined data centers for VMC cloud. This technology is AWS and VMware combined in a way that helps companies come off old legacy uh infrastructure and into uh the goodness of the cloud. By doing this first step for these 60 products and services in one of our old data centers, they were helping the company immensely, freeing up, uh, eventually, uh, when, when costs were all tallied, uh, $7 million of opportunity just to, just to get out of this one data center. Each member of the team is important, so I reminded the network engineer that his BGP cutover had to be perfect, and it was. The cloud guys needed to understand that their Venter migration had to be product by product so that we could let folks know exactly what time their precious VMs and thus their product was going across the wire into the new world. I think uh this plus uh weekly meetings, uh, encouragements when they succeeded, uh, a, a lineup uh daily where we had a stand up with uh on a team's channel, helped the folks on the, on the project feel like they were back in on part of a team that was making a difference. And uh I feel that my leadership in that, in that example helped the company and helped that team feel better about itself and now they're raring to go. They're, they're looking forward to December 5th, um, and I'm sure it's gonna go well.

Well, I had help from um leaders, my, my own manager and a couple of the IT leads, the head of operations. Came to me and said, Dave, would you take this one? Because I had earned a reputation in the company for um handling hard work that was going to take a deeper dive. So I, I had their help in, in just understanding that the basic problem wasn't the technology, it was communications, that is letting folks know across the world that their product or service was going to be impacted on this particular day, and then just organizing the different parts of the uh of the technology team in a, in a way that uh helped them feel important. And uh I, I met with him individually, I met with them as a group. I asked them questions about the uh previous PM and the way he had handled things and in ways that uh I could help out. And so, you know, through a process of, of hearing what was, was kind of off from management and what they expected of me and also talking with the team, uh, I got a sense of what, what needed to happen. A third place I went, uh, because the company is going through a, um, kind of a cloud migration time going from on-prem ownership to uh cloud services. There was also a group of folks who are the cloud team, and I got in good with them, meaning I established relationships with the head of cloud enablement and the vice president in charge of cloud, who reported into the CIO. And again, to not, not go too much at length on this, they had some helpful hints as well as to why this was important, uh, why we should take this forward and, and, and how it set us up for uh good stuff in the future. Hope that helps.

I'd, I'd say the most important thing is leaders who show a personal interest in the development and daily work of their people. I, I, I can't say it any more plainly than that. Uh, one of the things I, uh, put forth in my, in my resume is my time as a Marine Corps officer and that place, uh, that organization is keen on leadership and by example. And by example, I mean showing personal interest in the development and growth and day to day happiness and joy of the people on the team. Now it's funny to maybe think about a marine as being happy, but a Marine whose job is understood, similar to a system administrator or a SQLDBA who gets an extra 5 minutes to talk with his PM about what's going on in his life or something that needs improvement. can make all the difference. You do that across a team, uh, and they start reinforcing each other and then literally they are unstoppable, but it takes that, uh, that, uh, that catalyst, that leader, that's the kind of person I am. That's what I bring to the table here and I would offer our uh AWS pro-service clients.

Well, it, it comes back, I think to uh people. I I appreciate the question. I, I did not know the previous PM in this situation, but I can imagine that that person, um, If, if he needed help, um, I, I hope that that person felt comfortable being in an organization where he could reach out for support and help, uh, if he needed it. Sometimes folks, uh, especially PMs feel like they have to have all the answers. And so I, I think uh. If, if, if an environment espouses learning and growth, and if those managers, the obsolete I mentioned, my manager, uh, know the skills and traits and where that, where a person can stretch, then they'll be placed into a project or an effort that is appropriate for their skill set. I think in this case, there might have been a misplacement or mis uh assignment and it cost this guy his job. Um, I'm, I'm not, I'm not happy about that, but what I did was then take a sad story and, and make some, some good lemonade out of it. And I can't leave it there though. I, I have to make sure that my behaviors uh going forward. Lead to a place where it's OK to talk about I'm overloaded or I have too much work or that feels a little tough. Can I have a deputy PM to help me out? Um Things like that would help folks do better.