Being a project manager today is a lot different from playing that role a few years ago. Just ask Brenda Dunn, a project manager/business analyst at Long & Foster Real Estate Inc. in Fairfax, Va. She recently headed up a project to build a critical relocation system for the privately owned realty firm.
For several hours each day over a period of more than six months, Dunn worked intensively with users from five different departments to hash out exactly how the system would work. “I’d sit with them and get approval on the workflow, the drop-down menus, the names of fields — everything,” she says. Part of Dunn’s job was to corral all of the users’ opinions and needs into a single, unified system and help them visualize what it would look like.
Once the requirements and screen prototypes were solidified, Dunn sent them to 12 offshore programmers in India whom she had previously met to tutor in the ways of the U.S. real estate business. Then she coordinated communication between the users and programmers, remaining mindful of the cultural and time-zone differences.
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