Things have turned around lately. Early in the year, I was with the functional safety team getting the a product to comply with a product development lifecycle that enable the product to be compliant to a safety standard for either automotive or industrial use. The software director (which was my previous boss before joining the functional safety team) came down to Penang. I had set up a meeting with him to talk through some of the systematic process that we need the software team to comply. He had let me talked through the list of issues and complains, then he sprung a surprise. We had a program manager in his team who is running 2 programs in parallel and overwhelmed. He asked if I would like to take up program management for one of the project, so happen to be follow up project from the one that I left off before joining functional safety. I didn’t have to wait before he leaves Penang to accept the offer and the transition was pretty quick after that.
This new project is great, it’s the next generation AI/Deep Learning chip that we will collaborate with a new team that came on board as an acquisition based in Ireland. Another great aspect of this assignment is that I get to start from the project execution phase. The planning has been done, I get to execute this from the current program manager who planned for it. It is pretty normal for a project manager to be involved in the whole planning phase and then handing it to another person for execution. Typically the planning phase involved a small team of experienced lead and the execution phase involves the whole army.
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