Fiona Park, major projects manager

In hiring a nanny, Park chose to dent the family budget—”to make sure that the things that needed to get done at home got done without me having to worry about it”—though she does admit that she didn’t always have the time for her family that she would have liked. In the end, it wasn’t the work/life dilemma that made life after leave difficult, but the “massive, high priority program of work” she’d never done before.

Today she finds project management a “handy skill set” to have in her non-work life, applying it to a home renovation, and even passing it onto her daughter. “I laugh at my 18-year-old daughter who is a bit of a natural project manager. She insists, as an 18-year-old does, on not being too much like her mother, but I see the way she organises events for her friends and organises people and I have a bit of a chuckle about genetics,” says Park.

Now, and then?

Currently the Manager for Major Projects at Victoria’s Department of Education and Early Childhood Development, Park is responsible for the implementation of the foundation projects for the Ultranet, the state’s new online student centred electronic learning environment. The position is her second in public service, having moved from a role running and reforming the Projects and Programs team at the City of Melbourne.

“They were all doing blended roles—project manager, business analyst and test lead—and, as a result, they were having an issue with getting things delivered,” she explains. “I introduced the professions. Rather than just people there to do whatever they were told to do today, they became a team of people who were there to deliver specific agreed projects. They each had a clear role to play and a purpose.”

As part of the professionalisation process, Park arranged for team members to join either the AIPM or the International Institute of Business Analysis depending on the role with which they were more closely aligned. She adds: “When I needed to hire contractors, I hired contractors who were knowledge sharers to mentor people who had never had structured roles.”

Following on from this philosophy, it is not surprising that Park says she enjoys the people side of program and project management “dealing with people understanding their issues and what they want to achieve and sharing their goals”. And this applies to her stakeholders as well as her team: “I’ve always viewed the people who I’ve been delivering to as my customers. I enjoy delivering good customer value.”

Having moved from working at private organisations to government, Park finds that while these values may differ, the essential questions remain the same: “Is the customer happy with what you delivered? Does it meet their needs? Was it delivered to their expectations?”

She says: “If you manage their expectations well, if you make sure customers understand what can and can’t be done, and when it can be done, then they’re generally pretty happy because they’ve been empowered to make good choices or the choices they need to make. So it’s not happening to them, it’s happening for them.”

Education is Park’s domain in another way as well. Part of her focus now is to have project management accepted as a value-add practice. “It would be lovely if people just understood that project management and program management were not only necessary but make the difference between success and failure,” she says. “Good project management is not getting involved in the day-to-day and not being the technical expert, but being the facilitator of it all.”

And the education doesn’t just go one way; there’s a strong desire to “keep exploring different fields of project delivery,” Park says. “I enjoy learning new things, learning new industries. I’d like to move more into business program management or programs in different industries.”