Mark Porter, business project manager
Lessons learnt also form the spine of his understanding of the discipline. Through his career, Porter has distilled these into three main parts: understand and manage the expectations of all stakeholders; proactively provide support and encouragement for project team members so they “come out the other end richer for the experience”; and manage your personal project effort.
“I had been known to put in regular 14-hour days on projects, and it wasn’t until about three years ago that a wise old friend and project manager told me that if I had to work that long, I needed to have a good hard look at my scheduling, resource levels and time management,” he relays.
Don’t believe this means Porter is less passionate about project management, though. He sees it as a role with no real drawbacks—”I enjoy the challenging, but ultimately rewarding, twists and turns of all projects and programs”—however regrets that some jobs take him away from his wife and two daughters, sometimes for extended periods. “If I could change anything, it would be to work much closer to home, or better still, live my pipe-dream of being a stay-at-home dad,” he says.
We are family
Expressing a fervour for rugby union—wishing the Queensland Reds a better season this year and hosting high hopes for the Wallabies for the 2011 Rugby World Cup—Porter also likes the quieter things in life, including home gardening and the “simple pleasure of walking along Burleigh Beach to North Burleigh Beach with my wife and two daughters on Sunday mornings and stopping off to get breakfast”.
The relative luxury of spending time this way comes down to that all-important planning. “I plan like mad. I’m addicted to my Blackberry and to my online calendar, much to my wife’s dismay. I get frustrated when things are out of schedule, even in home life,” he laughs.
Porter also admits to rising daily at 5am and going to bed near to midnight—“I just love to live every second of life”—though says, come Friday evening, he belongs to his family. “I work from 5am when I’m on call to everyone. I have clients overseas so I work in different time zones, but I switch off on Friday evenings at about five o’clock then come back online on Sunday evenings. I keep the weekends aside for my wife and daughters and it seems to be working so far. And we try to get no less than two restful holidays a year.”
Porter’s strong connection to family is also expressed through his affinity with the Indigenous community, whose background he shares on his mother’s side. He believes project management is a good way to build internal and community capacity, not necessarily through development projects but through educating, coaching and mentoring people with Indigenous heritage on project management skill sets.
At present, he observes that Indigenous people often don’t take senior management roles or aren’t represented in senior management roles. “I see no reason why Indigenous people can’t be project and program managers of the future. What my company and I would like to do is empower them through training mechanisms, through mentoring and coaching, and work with peak bodies like the Australian Institute of Project Management (AIPM) with tools such as forums and interest groups, to assist and support Indigenous Australians to a stage where they are leading projects, in their own communities and beyond,” he explains.
Although Indigenous development projects would be a natural fit for this type of role, Porter’s plan is broader. “We’d like to look at project managers of the future who can lead large change projects, information technology projects, construction projects and so forth. We’re just starting the building blocks of that and will have some exciting opportunities maturing and ready for market in the near future.” And what better skill than project management to start the ball rolling?
