Project Management Specialist, PGIM Fixed Income

I'm Donnie Shizad, and I work as a project management specialist within a financial services organization. I work across the organization with various groups to accomplish different business objectives. Our business objectives come from senior management. They kind of trickle down to my team. They can vary from there might be a regulatory change or a new policy out there, and if that were to occur our team will do the research, find out what the regulatory policy is or the changes and see how it impacts our company, if at all. And if it does then we work to implement different procedures so that we're compliant. So a day in the life as a project management specialist would be typically my day starts with a couple of meetings so we'll do a catch-up meeting with the different groups that we're working with. So my role is the project manager, but then I work with subject matter experts on the topic that we're trying to resolve. So we'll get everybody together in a room, discuss what happened the day before, and then kind of work towards our new objectives and action items and make sure that the people that are actioning those items know what they're doing. So usually when we get a new project or a new objective that we have to achieve, what my role would be to is kind of really dig down, question, find out what it is that we're actually doing to find the project. And then as a project manager we kind of look back to look at the big picture and kind of put a plan together. So there's always a big plan behind all of these projects, and then typically what I like to do is kind of break it down into like achievable tasks, so each time we have a meeting or we meet with a specific group that has the action items, it's basically based off of that big plan and then they'll know what the action items are because we're tackling a certain part of the project as our priority. So sometimes they'll stagger projects and sometimes it's simultaneously we'll be working on multiples. But right now we're working on a pretty big project. We're implementing an accounting system. So right now our company has a bunch of different vehicles that we sell, and they're all on different accounting systems. So what we're doing is streamlining the process. We're putting it all on one accounting system and our trading platform will now speak to our accounting system.