4 reasons to take Software Engineering & Data Science courses as a Technical Project Manager
And how to use these become more valuable
And how to use these become more valuable
(Notes: All opinions are my own)
Introduction
Working as a Project Manager (PM) in Tech firms is no easy feat. The position is usually full of ambiguity, in the sense that actual job responsibilities span a very broad and somewhat undefined set of tasks, and it is matched by a lower degree of formal authority compared to functional team managers.
These aspects, coupled with expectations on PMs to work across multiple departments and to act as the bridge between business and technical stakeholders, set the stage for a demanding role.
I have been working as a PM in Tech for about 1.5 years as I write this piece, after a couple of stints in Analytics Consulting, and in this article, I want to share with you why taking technical courses focused on Software Engineering and Data Science is especially critical for today’s Project Manager in the industry who may not come from a formal technical background.
Below you can find some articles about my efforts in continuous learning & development.
What I learned in 4 years of online Data Science courses
Perspectives from a data learning adventuretowardsdatascience.com
What I learned after 44 courses and 308 hours on DataCamp
My thoughts along my (ongoing) data analytics learning journeytowardsdatascience.com
What I Learned After 4 Certifications & 1200 Hours Of freeCodeCamp
Five practical thoughts along my (ongoing) software developer learning path.medium.com
Establish Technical Credibility
The first and perhaps most obvious reason is that upskilling from a technical perspective while also making use of your project management skill is a great way to establish credibility within your project team and cross-functional departments.
For example, in my experience, I need to be able to get involved and contribute to delivering projects spanning multiple technical domains, from our CRM software to Business Intelligence, Data Engineering, Forecasting, and Data Science.
While I may not be actively involved as a technical contributor in all projects to the same degree, having taken and upskilled in these domains allows me to get a better understanding of the project at hand, ask the right questions at the right time and most importantly avoid the image of the Project Manager who’s just seen as someone who adds administrative overhead to projects in a way that is unrelated to the subject matter and that slows down the team’s work.
Having a better understanding of the subject matter of the project has then the additional positive effect of making you better equipped to execute your PM tasks precisely because your technical understanding of the project is greater and allows you to better estimate critical aspects of project planning, scoping, testing and overall delivery timeline implications
Embed yourself as an active project contributor
The second benefit that comes with technical upskilling is that you additionally become an effective team contributor to the project and not just a “manager” of it.
While this may not always be beneficial to the PM’s overall time and effort investment (if you are a project manager on a Data Science project, you should theoretically not dabble excessively on data pre-processing or modeling tasks), there may come times when a more active contribution during the implementation phase of the project may be required, especially in less structured tech organizations where project roles are not always neatly separated.
There have been times in my PM career so far when I felt I was wearing different hats and roles at different moments in time. Sometimes I would be a Business or a Data Analyst, some other times I would get involved in discussing front-end development and user-interface topics, and so forth.
Taking Software Engineering courses and absorbing technical knowledge allows you to expand your contribution range on a given project, and become an overall more effective team member, and not just a coordinator and facilitator, which are “hats” that are closer to the more formal set of Project Manager tasks.
Open up multiple pathways for growth in your role
Taking a more forward-looking glance at a Project Manager career, the great benefit of technical upskilling is the fact that you will be able to open up multiple doors of opportunities to move into your next role, whatever you desire that to be for yourself.
Programming, Software Engineering, and Data Science knowledge are tremendously in demand at the moment, and obtaining these while working as a Technical PM will greatly add options to your future career moves.
In Tech organizations, at least from my experience, careers move laterally just as much as vertically, and new teams are constantly being formed in all areas where companies need and want to innovate.
Limiting yourself to “pure” Project Management tasks not only limits your effectiveness as a PM in the short term but also hinders your future self.
I’m not sure if I’ll be a Project Manager in 10 or 15 years, but I am sure that the more skills I add to my toolset the more flexibility and ease I will be able to exercise on future career moves. Adding this type of optionality is very useful, so don’t limit your learning to traditional Project Management skills, but build on it and augment it with technical courses.
Purple is good, and most importantly rare
In my previous job as an Analytics Consultant, we had a saying in our team: “Be a Purple person”; being purple meant becoming a hybrid between a technical person (with core Data Science and Programming skills) and a business-savvy contributor.
In other words, being purple means being able to bridge the gap between the business and the technical domain, and becoming a rare commodity for a project team.
Purple profiles are indispensable and display a broad and wide skillset. Technical Project Managers are great candidates for developing purple profiles that become very valuable for organizations since the subset of people who have this level of technical and non-technical skills is very rare.
So what’s my recommendation for this section? Take courses and strive to become as purple as you can!
Summary and next steps
Overall, as a Project Manager, I recommend investing in your technical development enough.
Don’t limit yourself to the PM world but constantly develop your skills to find ways to:
Become a more competent and credible Project Manager
Expand the range of your project contribution
Open up multiple future career options
Becoming as Purple as you can!
Enjoy the ride, and thanks for reading!
Access my free Data Science resource checklist here.
Join Medium with my referral link — Edoardo Romani
As a Medium member, a portion of your membership fee goes to writers you read, and you get full access to every story…Edo-romani1.medium.com