5 minutes with… Melissa Joy
Melissa Joy is an experienced product and project delivery professional with over 9 years working within the IT industry, specialising in website and app development. Currently, she is an Product Manager at a telecoms business, giffgaff. Melissa lives in Witney, Oxfordshire with her husband, two young children and two cats. She enjoys a hybrid working environment, travelling into the office up to 4 times a month.
This article was originally posted on LinkedIn in October 2023 and Melissa has kindly given permission for the content to be added here.
Why did you choose a career in delivery or project management?
In all honesty, it’s one that sort of chose me! I had just finished my undergraduate degree in Environmental Science and the government had cut a lot of funding at the time, so jobs were few and far between. I didn’t want to move back in with my Mum, so I needed to do something that made me enough cash to keep renting in Oxford, but something I enjoyed, too.
Before University, I considered an IT Project Management degree as I have an A Level in ICT, but chose Environmental Science instead. I already knew I enjoyed organising and managing people’s time from the various bar and retail jobs I’d held down throughout university so started looking for a way into the industry.
Initially, I had an internship at a local publishing company, working on their digital learning assets and converting them into HTML5 from Flash and dabbled in some W3Schools basic HTML and CSS courses. Eventually, I found an opening as a project coordinator at a digital agency called White October, managing their support team and the rest is history.
What advice would you give someone starting out in the industry?
Companies will often do academies for people looking to start in the industry so I would start there initially. I’d also recommend emailing smaller organisations and seeing if they’d be willing to let you shadow their delivery teams to get to grips with what they have to do in their day to day.
If you’re already working in a company but want to move into the role, get in touch with the head of the delivery department and ask to shadow their team. See if your current manager will let you go on a short secondment to the delivery function to try your hand at it for a while and if it suits, ask to move over.
If you’re interested in getting into delivery, you probably already have a lot of the great management skills required from previous roles or life experiences. This could be from managing your own wedding or organising teams in pubs and restaurants. Put these experiences down on your CV and really sell them when talking to organisations, they all count.
Entry level jobs within support teams as an admin or coordinator are a great way to cut your teeth in the industry and many companies have a need for them.
Don’t be afraid to email companies directly even if they don’t have an active opening, they might do in the near future and could consider you as a first option for an interview.
And finally, go to all the meetups! Whether that is virtually or in person, it’s so important to network with people. Even if it doesn’t seem like a lead came out of that one event, someone will surprise you later down the line. This might be someone saying they’ve seen a job that might be of interest to you or they may even be hiring themselves. The content at meetups is a brilliant way to learn more about the industry and the unique trials and tribulations people experience.
Have you ever worked on a particularly difficult project? Why was it rubbish/tough/hard?
I’ve had a few of these in my time! I think it mostly boils down to insufficient communication, from all sides. Setting expectations on the delivery timelines is one thing, but also roles and responsibilities, and agreeing who is accountable for what in a very clear way is so important. Transparency for everyone involved is key, from understanding stakeholder expectations to how things are deployed to production.
One of the more difficult times I have had with this, was being part of an outsourced bolster to an existing team, where the project had already been kicked off and we had to slot in immediately. There was a limited budget and we had no control over how they were managing their stakeholders, or their team. It felt like every day there was a new skeleton to uncover and some of the team were not forthcoming with vital information that would have made the delivery easier. Things got very fraught with ever changing requirements from stakeholders and a difference in opinion on working culture to get things done e.g. expecting overtime.
I really feel that if we had all been involved from the beginning, roles and responsibilities would have been set without ambiguity with clear expectations on each person ironed out. We could have been clear about the information we needed access to and set up regular check points to be candid about how things were going. From a technical perspective, if budget allowed, it would have been great to have formal onboarding for the engineers so it was clear from an architectural perspective and deployment perspective how things were expected to work.
What do you think are the most important skills for a delivery or project manager to have?
When you’re managing the delivery of something, whether that is internal or client facing, you will need to work with many different people. You won’t always get on with those people, but being able to adapt to their working styles and figuring out what motivates them is key for success.
Having great empathy for your peers is integral to fostering good working relationships, and ultimately creating allies for when the going gets tough. As scary as that C level person is to work with, and difficult, they are someone's son, daughter, brother, sister, wife, husband and so on. Adding a human element to the way you approach challenges with people will be a great thing to leverage.
Sadly, there is always going to be a political element to working in an organisation, so being able to suss out the playing field and leveraging it well will really get you far.
Being open to new ideas and the fact that you could be wrong is so important in a delivery role. We can get bogged down with the technical implementation details and what a client wants, but it’s important to listen to those around you and be collaborative with your work. You may be set on an idea, but someone with a fresh perspective and different skill set can add a unique angle to a situation, leading to a better outcome.
Ultimately, every company does delivery slightly differently, and there will always be different tools to get to grips with. The subtle softer skills are the key ones that help people to be really successful in a delivery space.
What do you think are the biggest challenges facing delivery and project managers today?
Post-pandemic, we’ve all moved to a more hybrid way of working. This has been amazing for work-life balance, myself included as I have two young children. The main challenge with this is how do you foster a great remote culture, especially when the previous culture hinged so much on people being cocolated. Engagement with teams remotely is tough, especially if there are different time zones and cultures involved.
There are lots of suggestions and remote games to encourage team time, but nothing replaces that face to face element of being able to roll your chair over to someone's desk and have a quick chat. At giffgaff, we try to meet at least twice a year as a whole company. While it's good to get everyone together, there’s still something special missing from being physically with your team.
The other challenge that comes to mind, tends to impact smaller organisations, but the inevitable wearing of many hats that a delivery professional will undertake. More people are experiencing burnout than ever before, and with product or operations roles becoming redundant across the industry, there is an expectation that the delivery function will pick this up with no adverse impact.
What projects would you have loved to have been involved in?
While I worked at Torchbox (another digital agency), the main clientele were charities and public sector organisations. It’s always incredible to think that you’re part of making a difference to those people they’re supporting and I had the opportunity to work with Samaritans on their main site, intranet and launch of web chat which was incredibly rewarding.
Pulling on that rewarding aspect, it would have been very interesting to work on the COVID-19 app that was launched during the height of the global pandemic. Although very stressful, the programme of work to manage across many different teams and technical capabilities would be so varied and I think there would have been a lot of technological firsts achieved during that time.
In the future, I would love to be involved in some sort of enviro-tech or health-tech project, improving things for people or the world around us.
This post is from the ‘5 minutes with’ series of articles from people in the delivery management and project management space.