Parker Jones

Contact

rss6ua@virginia.edu

Position, company, location, and industry

Project/Program Manager, National Veterinary Associates, Remote/Stafford, VA
Industry: Veterinary services

How has the M.S. in MIT Program helped you create value in your current role or organization?

My organization is currently undergoing significant transformation efforts in nearly every major function – nearly everything we’ve covered in class is immediately relevant to my job on a day-to-day basis! As a member of my organization’s Enterprise Transformation team, the more context I can gain on how other companies work through the challenges my organization is facing, the better I can problem solve at my job. Change management is an area where my company, which has over a thousand individual locations and multiple intersecting lines of business with their own unique cultures and needs, always needs additional support. We have amazing change management professionals who work miracles to deliver training and communications materials to our users, but there are always gaps in the way in which we integrate this team into our solution development processes. I’m looking forward to the focus on this area in the upcoming course work.

What strategies have worked best for balancing coursework with your full-time job and personal life?

Fortunately, my husband just finished his own graduate degree and knows what I’m going through. He’s been dedicated to making sure our personal life fosters a permissive environment for me to do schoolwork, and I’m extremely grateful! That being said, we are actually in the process of unpacking our house after an interstate move, and my full-time job is often more than full-time and has presented more of a challenge. Many of the strategies that have helped me plan my readings and project work effectively are the same ones I regularly apply to my job (and my whole very Virgo existence to be honest): Make a list; make a schedule. I try to identify which evenings I can carve out time during the week and segment them into time devoted to work preparation, time devoted to building bookshelves or fixing the weird holes the previous homeowners left in things, and time devoted to school. Then I make a task list for each time block and stick to it.

How have your classmates’ experiences and backgrounds enhanced your learning?

Getting to interact with my classmates and hear their stories and experiences has been one of the best parts of the program so far. As a project/program manager, I have often been a “one-of-one” position without many peers to interact with or bounce ideas off of regularly. Getting to know people with similar interests and diverse, truly impressive backgrounds has been really rewarding.

Which course or module has had the greatest immediate impact on your thinking or work?

I really enjoyed the opportunity in Module 1 [Enterprise Architecture] to do some financial analysis for our final project. This is an area that I have often been involved in creating inputs for, but rarely if ever had reason to dig into the details of financial projections. It’s a different way of looking at initiatives, and I’m looking forward to doing deeper work in this area in Module 2 [Digital Transformation].

What made you choose a program like this at this point in your career?

My career has been a fairly even balance of technical and strategic work, and this overlap is where I’m most interested in continuing to grow my expertise. When I applied to this program, I was also considering an MBA, but what ultimately drew me to MSMIT instead were a couple of considerations: From whom in my career have I most enjoyed learning? To whom do I go to solve problems? When I thought about my experiences so far, I realized that I’ve felt most engaged and effective in environments wherein I get to work with a highly qualified team of technical experts. I wanted to recreate that experience for my education.

What has surprised you most about the learning experience so far?

I’ve been consistently surprised so far by how much it turns out I already knew, mostly just by project exposure osmosis. Coming more from the business strategy side than a technical background, I would never have thought of myself as an IT generalist, but maybe I was all along? It’s been fun to be able to match up partial knowledge that I’ve gleaned over the years with the foundational learning and deeper understanding that I’m getting from the program. I’m gaining both new skills and a new level of confidence in the ones it turns out I already had.