In the spotlight: Kyle Edmund Hayes

If you’ve been reading along with us this month, you’ll know that we’ve been celebrating our 30th birthday and, as such, have also been exploring what our customers who are also in their 30s are doing in their roles.

First up is Kyle Edmund Hayes.

Hi Kyle – would you like to introduce yourself and tell us about the role you work in?

My name is Kyle and I work for a company called Infor; I’m based in Chichester. Infor is a global software and services company. We focus on providing beautifully designed solutions within industry micro-verticals.

I work in Global Enablement as a worldwide Programme Manager and, as part of my role, I focus on:

• Partner Enablement – delivering and co-ordinating training to partners, both publicly and privately.

• Education Alliance Programme – providing member institutions with access to free innovative technologies, hands-on industry learning initiatives, and train-the-trainer programming that can translate into marketable skills and experiences for students.

Why did you decide to become a project manager/work in project management? How did you get into it?

I’ve now been working in project and programme management for about 10 years, but I started life off as a technical specialist in Microsoft Windows and Unix. I found that I enjoyed doing different things on a daily basis in this role; so, project management was appealing to me because the nature of the role meant that, for set periods of time, you would go in and make a change happen, and then once everyone was happy and the project had closed you’d move on. It’s a great industry to be in because you get to meet loads of great people and, because every project is different, you get to focus on lots of different specific areas.

What sorts of projects do you manage?

Overall, they’re technology change projects where we’re implementing a new system, migrating a customer over or performing a transformation. When I started, it was all about software development and managing things using an agile methodology, but over time that’s evolved, and I’ve moved into helping customers get through digital transformations whilst migrating from one platform to another. One of the largest projects I worked on was focused on education in the UK, where we were moving customers from a platform called Live@Edu to Office 365, country-wide, so that was pretty huge!

The life of a project manager isn’t straightforward – each company, each project etc. can vary massively. You can go from doing widescale country programmes, where you’re going out and introducing new platforms, processes and systems; to working in smaller environments, where you’re upgrading a company’s systems from one office to another. Things can change rapidly but, because of the skills you learn, you can easily adapt and implement the things you need to, successfully.

So, you’ve done PRINCE2® with us – how and why did you choose to do this qualification? And how does this framework help you in your daily work life?

I did PRINCE2 Foundation with ILX in 2014, followed by the PRINCE2 2017 version of the Practitioner qualification earlier this year, both as e-learning. In the UK, regardless of which job you go for in the project management in