Lisa-Ann Barnes
I met Lisa-Ann Barnes when I did an Applied Project Management course at Northwestern School of Professional Studies. I know that I would not be a certified Project Manager without her class; she made the PMBOK come alive (not a book known for its riveting plotline). I’ve been lucky to be able to stay in touch with her since 2018, and get her counsel when I started my first major project for a new role in 2019.
I ask her about what she sees as her origin story, and she tells me she graduated a semester early from college (with a Finance major), which meant it was before most companies came to the campus to recruit students. She interviewed only with Arthur Andersen for a programmer role, which she got. From there she served as a consultant, a team leader, a project coordinator, and realized how much she enjoyed managing projects, much more than being in a purely technical role.
It is the combination of working with people and planful analysis that she enjoys most about project management. After a few years in the consulting side of Arthur Andersen, she moved to the software “company” within Arthur Andersen. She was the supervisor of the helpdesk for the project management methodology and software products. She then moved to a role of teaching clients about the project management methodology and software product, along with other development-focused methodologies and tools. After 7 years of travel, she had had enough, and decided to move to a software startup that was building a new project management and development software product. Remember this was way before joining a startup was seen as cool! While there she was in charge of the product development and customer implementation teams, in addition to being the chief methodologist (one of her favorite titles ever). After the company was acquired by a different one, she decided to start her own consulting business in 1994; this was also way before consulting was mainstream.
Since then her business has evolved - it has grown and it has contracted, both in terms of work and employees. Over the years she has become more focused on what projects she works on, and her work-life balance has played a key role in her choices. When her daughter was younger, she did not take on projects that needed her to travel or did not allow her to be home when her daughter returned from school. She worked with global teams, where early mornings and late evenings is when the work got done.
I ask her if there is anything she would have done differently during the course of her career, and she tells me she wishes she would have been braver. She would have trusted her instincts, and done things sooner. One of the things she wanted to do was build project management classes online, but did not because she was not certain they would appeal to people. Of course, the last year has turned that upside down. What drives her is loving what she does, and the variety of her work - for example, she has recently been working with a food manufacturer and is learning a lot about the challenges they face. She is fueled by knowing that project management is a way to make changes, and those changes improve the world in many ways, big and small.
Since I met her at Northwestern, I ask her what brought her there as a faculty member. She tells me there were two people who invited her to join. One served in a leadership role, who she knew through Women In Tech, a group she was part of; and another who was a mentor from her Arthur Andersen days. She enjoys the experience greatly, everything from meeting students from different professional backgrounds, facilitating sharing of experiences, and teaching people who were using what they learned to do the work.
On a personal front, she is a percussionist and is part of two ensembles, which are just starting to restart after the pandemic shut down in-person activities. She has been playing since the fourth grade and this was the longest she went without playing, which was not easy. She enjoys spending time with her family, and playing in her garden -- she laughs as she tells me she only chooses plants that grow well. If it is needy, it won’t survive (I relate to that, as someone whose succulent tragically passed away recently). During the pandemic, she also started a Master’s of Education in Learning Design and Leadership. After wanting to do it for several years, she jokes that she ran out of reasons to not do it during the pandemic. The program focuses on design and making learning more impactful and she is excited about applying what she learns to improving her classes.
She has had a lot of people who have supported her with advice and in other ways at different stages of her career. As an independent consultant, she is her own manager and has built a group of supporters, cheerleaders and fellow commiserators. It is someone from that group who challenged her when she said she can’t do something, by asking her what was getting in her way and what she was doing to remove those barriers. In the years since, she has written two books Project Management for Team Members and Project Management from Start to Finish.
When I ask where she sees herself in five years from now, she says she sees herself working less and playing more music. That sounds like a lovely future to me. If you would like to learn more about her work, and reach out to her for her project management services, check out BluePontoon.