A Day in the Life of a Project Manager With Banking Industry IT  

One could argue that Alex Raymond is living two lives at once. The scope of his workday is active proof of being a project manager over multiple ventures in the banking industry and related IT builds. Starting at the crack of dawn, Alex is already engaged in prior day details and changes, scheduling new team tasks and meetings, and tweaking where additional touchpoints need to occur to keep things on track. By the time the traditional morning in the workday starts, Alex Raymond is already deep in daily standups and team connections to stay on top of project progress in multiple channels. In a typical Agile fashion, movements are reported, impediments identified, and resources reallocated to keep things moving as efficiently as possible.

People are a PM’s Synergy

However, as any experienced PM knows, a project lead is only as good as his or her team. Alex Raymond works through, coaches, supports and connects with his team members regularly throughout the day, keeping each pod in motion and moving towards deliverables, especially given how action-oriented the banking industry tends to be on seeing results and progress reports on IT projects.

With a combination of cloud and collaboration tools ranging from Azure DevOps to Jira, Alex Raymond is also developing and pushing regular reporting out so keep various executive stakeholders in tune with the latest project statuses affecting their areas, as well as keeping tabs on project progress overall.

Creator and Accountability Response in One

Additionally, Alex Raymond also has to be accountable for keeping projects within their cost parameters and budgets as well, which can be challenging when the inevitable project slippage occurs. Not only does he juggle smaller ventures in the range of $1 million or less, Raymond is also simultaneously tracking larger engagements, some to the tune of as much as $18 million. All of that activity ultimately translates into billing and revenue generation for his company consistent with their original project contracts.

No Rest for the Engaged

No surprise, the end of the day is only the afternoon break; Alex Raymond is typically using the evenings to catch up on what has happened in the day, updating his individual project road maps, adding in some additional key reporting features when needed for big presentations the next day and thinking ahead about where the next project phases need to be before they start. Like an overlapping Gantt chart, Raymond’s day as a PM is a constant movement of opening and closing windows and task phases. There’s no time for resting on one’s laurels; that only makes room for the next new projects coming online with new challenges to go after as well.