A day in the life of a Project Manager

Not many people might realize, but working as a Project Manager is different from industry to industry. In order to shine more light on these differences, one of our Project Managers, Marina, has agreed to share her thoughts on what a typical day looks like for someone working as PM for almost 2 years in the linguistic industry.

I guess many people think that we are not working on the projects themselves but just finding a linguist who will do all the work. Well, it is not entirely true. Very often the task is super unclear, the client may share multiple files from which we will need only a half. So, we need to figure out which ones are in the scope. Besides that, the notes might be tricky as well as the content of the files. So, we need to “clean” the file, delete unnecessary text or hide it and arrange it in such a way that linguists could work with it. After the translation is done and we export the completed file, we might have some “surprises” as the text won’t be arranged in the way we want. So, we need to figure out a way to make it perfect.

A usual day in PM looks like this:

Beginning of shift:
- Enjoying a cup of tea/coffee while having a friendly talk with my team members on the balcony. Checking if there is something tasty today in the kitchen.
- Checking my personal email and most urgent projects that should be delivered today or even yesterday :D

Middle of shift:
- Checking all my projects one by one and write down my own notes, so that I understand what is the situation and what should be prioritized. Solve some of the issues immediately I see them due to lack of time. Take other urgent projects.
- Inform/assign/reply to the linguists from Asian and European Countries before it becomes too late. If I do it later I might receive messages from the linguists asking to literally let them go since it’s the middle of the night :D Well, it will happen anyway since we are a 24/7 business :)
- Time for lunch with my team. We have only one rule during lunch: “No one is allowed to talk about work”… but of course, we tend to break this rule :D

End of shift:
-Taking care of the projects with linguists from South and North America. Process new projects that appeared meanwhile. Make the last QA - Leaving the notes for my colleagues who will take care of the projects after me

The most satisfying part at the end of the day is realizing that I managed to arrange everything out as much as possible. Now the “house is clean” so I can spend some time with its inhabitants, aka my fantastic team. We usually gather on the balcony and talk about everything and nothing before we go home.