Kayla Williams from Benefit Harbor - Taking on a New PM Leadership Role: Directing Growth while Protecting Your Time

This Project Life

Host, Jeff Plumblee, interviews Kayla Williams about project management and her career path. Kayla moved from the offices of auto dealerships to software account manager, implementation manager, product manager, and finally, project manager. She tells why project manager is the right job for her. She shares her notable successes, including a near-failure. Kayla reveals her favorite tools and procedures and how she guards her time to stay at her best. Listen in for ideas on the work to do before the project begins.

Key Takeaways:

• After sudden growth, leadership brought Kayla in to direct the company’s growth, increase efficiency, and support the operations teams in that growth.
• In her role, Kayla identifies problems, vets and implements potential solutions, and operationalizes them across the company.
• Kayla found challenges in a brand new role at an established company. She was the new person disrupting everybody’s life! She shares a related anecdote.
• The most amazing part for Kayla is that leadership is open to change for the better! The leadership brought Kayla in to provide outsider input.
• Leadership tells her the problem, and she runs with it and presents options for efficiency and accuracy.
• Benefit Harbor has just under 100 employees so it’s a small company compared to other software companies.
• Kayla considers “the next five questions” she’ll need to address as the project progresses. Having a good plan helps people get over the concern of extra work.
• What does it mean to get buy-in? Kayla talks about employees and leaders seeing the benefits of the change and wanting to use the new system.
• How did Kayla get into project management from managing departments at automotive dealerships? She discovered Excel and had an “aha” moment!
• Kayla got a job at a local software company in Charleston, NC as an account manager for their largest public-sector client.
• Kayla worked her way up from account manager to implementation consultant and then into products. After a time, she made the decision to leave.
• Kayla had a friend at Benefit Harbor who said she was the person for a position there. She applied. Her experience in products led her to project management.
• One project that stands out for Kayla is from her time as an account manager. The COO of the account required her to be looped into a project gone wrong.
• The current project manager did not have the payroll expertise that Kayla had, so Kayla stepped in and fine-tuned the project for 500K people for 22 clients.
• Kayla learned from that experience the importance of calling in all the necessary subject-matter experts for the project.
• Today, Kayla tries to ask all the questions about a project so if she needed to complete it herself, she would have all the information she needed to do so.
• Kayla uses Confluence from Atlassian to capture the information she gathers about the project. She explains how she uses Confluence to document it all.
• Kayla’s best project came when she was a product manager. It was a feature she needed to build across the company. It was in 2019.
• During the project, her entire team was laid off for COVID-19. Kayla became the product manager, product owner, and project manager!
• She was in leadership meetings answering for all the features they wanted. She had asked all the right questions of all the stakeholders and visualized the end product, so she was able to hand it off to the engineers and get it right.
• Kayla explains some details of the project, which came off seamlessly, largely because of her two months of doing the research at the front of the project.
• Kayla talks about APIs, which are transparent to the user but necessary and take time. Report clearly to leadership how and why your project time is being spent.
• Kayla’s success metrics include researching the ROI to show leadership the true value of the project.
• Kayla inherited a project. The data was very complex and they almost ripped out all the code because it wasn’t working! Do the up-front research first!
• Kayla tells why she cuts off her calendar at 4:30!
• Kayla’s views on instant messaging and texting. She’s a big fan of Teams for the messaging.
• Kayla’s last thoughts: Protect your time. Don’t expect yourself to be “on” all the time.

Brought to you by Moovila — Autonomous Project Management

Website: Moovila.com/thisprojectlife

Email: [e-mail]: Kayla Williams on LinkedIn

Benefit Harbor

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