5 minutes with… Andreea Daly
Andreea is a systems expert, founder and director of SaaSy. She’s a self-professed geek, leader of a nerd herd with a penchant for caffeine and confectionery. She fell into project management 6 years ago and has lived and breathed software ever since. She’s based near Reading.
This article was originally posted on LinkedIn in June 2023 and Andreea has kindly given permission for the content to be added here.
Why did you choose a career in delivery or project management?
I actually fell into project management by accident. I ran a business in my mid-twenties and when I exited, I was a bit lost professionally for a while. My team leader a few years later said I should look at project management based off my skillsets - I thought she was pulling my leg, I thought it was a skill not a career! But I went for it and took to it, and to software, like a duck to water. Haven’t looked back since. Turns out, I’m really good at herding cats in the world of software.
What advice would you give someone starting out in the industry?
It depends entirely on the sector! Project management and delivery are SO broad, two people with the same job title might be doing wildly different things day to day.
Biggest one though that probably applies everywhere - #1, don’t assume. For example, even now, any time I feel stupid because I’m about to state the obvious, I do it anyway - and it almost always pays off not to assume the obvious was obvious to anyone else.
#2, Don’t underestimate the power of donuts and other sugary treats to wrangle work favours from colleagues - I’ve blatantly bribed many a developer to get one of my projects pushed to the top of the estimation queue! And any long meeting or workshop is that much easier for everyone if there are snacks (no joke).
Have you ever worked on a particularly difficult project? Why was it rubbish/tough/hard?
Every software project is hard because they’re all so different and there are so many unknowns.
My biggest challenge is that software teams and companies are now used to working Agile, but clients don’t usually have Agile training. It’s a constant push-and-pull of assumptions and terminology and setting expectations and so on.
Integrations though in particular give me extra grey hairs, especially with legacy systems. And data migration. Gnarly stuff that usually feels like you’re trying to ram a square peg into a round hole, over and over and over again.
What do you think are the most important skills for a delivery or project manager to have?
Organisation is the obvious one. Patience and tenacity are close behind. People skills are essential (not necessarily diplomacy or negotiation, just knowing how to talk to different stakeholders and build or keep cohesion is so crucial to a successful outcome). The ability to prioritise, or help people prioritise, and understand the trade-offs and implications of those decisions.
What do you think are the biggest challenges facing delivery and project managers today?
Completely depends on the sector but a common one is hybrid/remote working. Resourcing/estimating/running/delivering a project with partly or fully asynchronous stakeholders is something most of us are still learning how to adapt into our planning - especially across different time zones.
It’s not an entirely new challenge, we’ve always had to deliver projects with people who have day jobs to manage at the same time, or developers who choose to keep weird and wonderful hours, but now so many more people are taking up that freedom of schedule, it’s even more of a challenge for us to plan ahead for.
What projects would you have loved to have been involved in?
I’d love to work on software projects on something as visionary as Neom, an IoT (internet of things) project to do with marine biology (combining my two big passions, software and scuba diving), and I’d love to be involved in a video game build. I’m a big gamer and would love to see first-hand how they’re designed and built. Any takers?
This post is part of a services called ‘5 minutes with’ series of articles from people in the delivery management and project management space.