Interview with Jeroen - Project Manager at PHPro
Fresh blood at PHPro, not even this COVID-19 period can stop us.
Jeroen Smolders joined us in September as project manager. How did he experience his first months at PHPro in these crazy corona times?
That's what we would like to know from him.
Curious about his story? Read on!
Hey Jeroen!!! We're curious: have you always been interested in development?
Hi! Originally I studied Marketing at PXL in Hasselt, but I have always been very interested in e-commerce and web-development. In my spare time, I was also working on that. During my internship as PM for marketing tasks, I soon noticed that the PM tasks for building web shops interested me much more. After my internship, I was able to start working at my internship company, a web agency in Utrecht, as PM for websites and then for web shops.
Utrecht, a nice city.
Yes, right! But then I started looking for a job closer to home and ended up at a web agency in Limburg. There we built custom web applications in Symfony, Drupal and also web shops. So I got more and more involved.
And now at PHPro, how does that feel? Are you getting enough support?
I feel very comfortable with my choice and enjoy working at PHPro. In terms of support and guidance, it's really good. Both at project level and general guidance. For each project we have a weekly meeting with the project team, so we coordinate the most important issues of the week and make sure everyone is up to date on the state of affairs. Because the technical lead, the architect, the product owner and the project manager meet together, everyone keeps an overview and you get useful input from different sides. When you yourself get stuck for a moment, often good solutions emerge there.
I also have weekly meetings with Ken, my mentor, or with Ilse. Mentoring is important at PHPro and it shows. The extra consultation gives you the chance to discuss a number of topics and projects in a different way than in the project team. That also gives you new insights on how to approach certain issues.
And how different was it to start somewhere during these crazy corona times?
I started in September when regulations were just a little less strict, so I was lucky to be able to be in the office for the first few weeks. Since October, I have been working continuously from home, with only occasional moves. In itself all that goes, with Teams and the like. The social aspect is obviously a bit less. I do know colleagues, but it takes longer than when you see each other in real life. Some colleagues you hear every day, and have never seen in real life. That's kind of weird.
Do you feel that the contact with customers is also different?
Customer contact is different than before the Corona crisis; where you used to have physical meetings, everything is now digital. For recurring meetings you can switch faster and it is no longer necessary to travel, which certainly has its advantages. Still, it will be good to be able to see the customers again in real life. Physically sitting together in a room gives a different dynamic than tuning in via conference calls.
What are currently your assignments within PHPro?
I work for several clients. For example, I work for Veritas, Sioen, Kemin and Cronos International (an application for CVs).
Those are already a lot of assignments. What are you most looking forward to for the coming period?
Good question. In any case, you are constantly learning. There are different assignments running through each other, which is doing PM in a different way than for one specific client. And you can also approach that in different ways. By combining internal PM work with external clients, you learn a lot.
I've also already learned a lot at the Magento 2 level, which I also find enjoyable.
And seeing the colleagues again for real, of course!