About Me
My initial inspiration for creating this site was as a sort of blog about Microsoft CRM, because in the process of implementing it during 2008, I learnt some things that I thought others might find useful. However, as I have built the site, this has evolved somewhat to cover project management, websites, photography and life in general - and in fact there's currently only a bit about CRM. At the moment, because I've got quite interested in web issues recently, there's a bit of a web bias, but I expect this will change when I get interested in something else.
Somewhat surprisingly - to me at least, because I have some difficulty accepting that I'm old enough for this to be true - I have worked for 24 years in various capacities with a number of different organisations. Most of these have been large blue chips, but more recently I've done some work with central government. All of this has been in some way linked with customer service and public facing activities. I started my career in customer service, dealing with customer contacts and customer complaints, and then moved into IT project management in 1995. Subsequently I have managed projects covering CRM, contact centres, telephony and e-commerce/web applications.
I have never subscribed to the school of project management that says that all you have to do as a project manager is shout at people (read my thoughts on this), or spend all day poring over plans and spreadsheets. Instead, I always like to have a pretty good understanding of whatever technology I'm delivering. I've found this pays dividends, because that understanding enables me to have sensible and informed conversations with both customers and suppliers, anticipate potential problem areas, and generally feel comfortable that whatever we're doing is sensible and achievable. There may well be something about being a control freak here as well, always a good quality for a project manager I think.
I don't claim to be a technical expert. However, if a problem means I need to get into the mechanics of an application then that's fine. On one particularly problematic IP telephony project I ended up tracing IP packets across a corporate network, which was something I hadn't quite expected to do. So, because it interests me, there is some techy stuff here, which perhaps others may find useful. Most of the technical articles I've written because I couldn't find a similar explanation myself, and thought others may find them useful. Equally importantly, I find writing things down a good way to make sure I really understand things as well.
There are also some articles that have more of a philosophical bent (must be that age thing again), and these are about dealing with people, mostly. I feel very strongly that you should always treat people as individuals. Incidentally, and happily, I've found that it's the way to get the best out of people. That's pretty important for a project manager.
So this is, as originally intended, at least partly a sort of blog, I suppose. Or maybe it's just a collection of articles. Blog is shorter and fits on menu buttons better, so that's what I'll stick to. I hope you find it useful, thought-provoking or funny as required.