Life of a Project Manager

 My first real project came when I wasn't a project manager, just a desktop support tech. You see, I worked at BellSouth for several years and was very good at my job. As a reward, I was offered a nice assignment close to where I lived in Vinings, Georgia. It's a suburb north of Atlanta. It's near Cumberland Mall and now is near where the Atlanta Braves currently play. I was in a group with 2 other techs and we did it all, desktop support, network support, etc. If you had an IT issue we solved it. We also had a large secured lab where we'd experiment on machines, make LANS for testing and generally have a lot of fun playing around with IT. It also gave me time to work on my MBA, which BellSouth paid for as part of their training program.  Soon, the other tech left for another assignment and it was just me and my boss, let's call him Steve. We got along well so there were no issues with just the two of us being there. Our overall boss, let's call him Willis, the

 It was simple really, not even something I thought about. As a matter of fact, someone else pointed it out to me. Prior to becoming a PM, I was what you might call an IT Specialist. I did desktop support, network administration, and even some desktop publishing. When I first got started in the IT world I was a Desktop Publisher at a small engineering firm that worked on a lot of Superfund cleanups. They decided to put in a wide-area-network (WAN). I asked the Network Admin if I could help and he said yes. So, between assignments, I ran cable, created cable, loaded network cards into machines, and helped set up the Novell Network. After completion he said, "Oh, you helped me build it, now you can run it." I was thrilled, I was now the new Network Admin for the Atlanta Office. He then left to wire other offices around the country.  As time went on, I moved on to other companies, including BellSouth, where I did a lot more network and desktop work, and Equifax, where I was the