Brian Schardt manages new product projects at Basic American Foods after starting in operations at Pepsi. He says project management is 90% communication and 10% execution, and advises joining a PMI chapter and never stopping learning as the field evolves.
My major was engineering management. I'm currently a project manager for the innovation department at Basic American Foods. Basically what we do is we vet out projects that the company wants to do, make sure that they're viable, the new products are going to fit in the market, and then we also help the company come up come up with new ideas for new product development. Some of the typical things I do is go to project meetings, go to marketing meetings to see what's happening in the marketplace. I use a lot of project management skills and a lot of Microsoft Office, primarily Excel and Microsoft Project skills a lot. I went to Pepsi Bottling Group as an operations associate, really starting to do project management work there, and they give me a task or a project that I had to work on for 3 months. Went into then the construction field with working on projects for a building, and then I went into here, so it's really been progressively project management levels. I wholeheartedly believe that project management is 90% communication and 10% doing the job. So a lot of interpersonal skills is really important. It's not the same every day, even though we say we're going to launch a new product in, say, May of next year. The tasks are the same, but each product is different. So it's always— each project is slightly different. We're not always launching the same product every year. I'd give two. One is never stop learning. The world of project management is always changing. And then the second is join your local PMI chapter, Project Management Institute chapter, wherever you are. They always have great volunteer opportunities and great ways to network and learn from other people, other project managers and other businesses to help yourself grow as a professional.
