Staying Around

I had a conversation with one of the project managers about working at the FDA and she informed me of something very perplexing and worrying. She has been working at the FDA for about 6½ years and is still the newest one in her position in her department. They have had a lot of other project managers, but she was the only one that stayed. This is extremely concerning, even more so because they’re already understaffed.

The reason they lost the most recent project manager was because they weren’t able to efficiently give her guidance on how to do the tasks they assigned to her. Because she kept asking for help and they weren’t able to give it, it became extremely frustrating for all parties. In an effort to prevent this from happening, she tasked my fellow interns and I to making a brand-new Job Aid which could be used to give step-by-step guidance to minimize the need to ask questions. While I think this project is a great idea, I feel like not only is it late, but it could be easily fixed.

Even though there aren’t many project managers in DDDP, there are at least three different departments with project managers on the floor I work on alone. With this many project managers, I feel it would be much more efficient to have a class or training session for new project managers. The FDA offers a plethora of training classes for different positions, so I feel making even just an online class available to new project managers could be tremendously helpful for new people in the department. This could do wonders for retaining project managers, syncing up all of the departments so they’re all on the same page, and minimizing chances for conflict.