Hi!
I’ve been working in IT operations / professional services for about 10 years. I have a technical background, left my engineering role to be a technical project manager.
I’m trying to find my path forward.
At my core, I’m a critic. I have a talent for finding broken or flawed business practices and I’m most interested in trying to fix them. Developing processes, creating training programs, writing handbooks and SOPs have been the things I’m most interested in doing.
I think what I would like to do is to talk to people and figure out what problems they have, so I can try to find the sources of friction, and find a way to fix them.
I’ll give an example:
My team is all project managers and a single overnight / overseas engineer. If we need something done by our “engineering team”, who fall outside of my official authority, I can’t simply assign them a task. I have to drop a ticket in a group chat and wait for someone to volunteer.
The solution to this, in my mind, is that we should either allow these tasks to be assigned by PMs to engineers directly, or all such tickets would go to a dispatcher on the engineering team who will assign and schedule those resources.
I have been doing things like this for a few years, but I’m always relying on soft power and interpersonal relationships to lobby for changes, because I’ve never had the authority to take them on in any official capacity.
Is there a name for this kind of function?
All I can think of is maybe a business analyst, but I don’t think that’s a senior enough title to cover the scope I’m talking about.
Any advice would be appreciated!