Position: Project Manager
Category: Project Manager
Experience: 1 years | English: fluent

Sales department and technical department are somewhat antagonistic: salespeople are inclined to promise a lot for a small price to close a deal faster, developers want to develop a high-quality product, which requires time and money. The sales department approves the Terms of Reference with a client, then comes to the Project Manager to assess the cost, which usually turns out to be much bigger than the sales expected. Neither party is willing to yield because it's either the project won't get sold or the project will be sold below cost and thus will be of poor quality. 
To solve this conundrum, I had to compile a database of all the previous projects, rank-order those by sophistication, amount of detail, visual appeal, and cost. Then the database was analyzed to reveal stable criteria affecting the cost (i.e. the amount of detail, art style, number of characters, length of the animation, custom-made functions, amount of alterations, timeframe, etc). 
The information was compiled into a Google Sheet-based interface, scripted for predefined options so that a salesperson would be able to calculate the approximate cost on the go just by filling in the number of animations, the number of characters, length, and complexity of animation. No technical knowledge required whatsoever as one can always consult the database to understand what costs what (and showcase every option to the client). All the calculations are made in person-hours to avoid confusion. This instrument allowed salespeople to negotiate faster and achieve the best possible value for money in every case, made the sales department much less reliant on the Project Manager and freed about four working hours per week for the PM. What is the most important: this relieved the interdepartmental tension and provided a common framework for both parties.
I have been working as a Project Manager in IT for ten months, mostly managing fixed-price projects varying from 20 to 1800 manhours in scope and three workdays to four months in the timeframe.

The working process was a mix of Waterfall and Scrum. Waterfall features are inherent to the nature of the final product (3D animation for mobile applications), as every consecutive stage of the development cycle is delivered by a single functional team of, on average, five people. The present Scrum artifacts were five-day sprints, weekly sprint planning and backlog grooming, daily scrums within functional teams, and, on some occasions, retrospectives.

My responsibilities covered the whole product development life cycle:
Pre-agreement cost estimation and general consulting for salespeople;
Risk assessment;
Communication with the clients (Ukrainian, Russian, American);
Collecting requirements (mostly for in-house projects);
Developing terms of reference (occasionally);
Project planning, including the workload planning for the company's overall team working on twelve simultaneous projects;
Managing project constraints and negotiating the tradeoffs with the client;
Generating ideas for seemingly unresolvable issues (not all of these were brilliant, frankly speaking :-) )
People management (a must when working mostly with creative people, especially when they work on multiple projects, some of which tend to become urgent at some point of time due to ridiculous force majeure);
Initial product testing;
Developing instructions and FAQs for clients and team members.

As far as I am told by the Head of PM, my key advantages are fluent English, analytical thinking, broad mindset, ability to creatively employ extensive cross-disciplinary knowledge, and stress-resistance. 

Now that I have experience managing projects in a turbulent environment, I am looking for a Project Manager position leaning towards the responsibilities of a Business Analyst and/or Product Manager.
I thrive in a reasonably dynamic working environment requiring lots of analytics and eliciting a need to get more educated for every project. My potential can be best revealed in a result- or product-oriented team looking for non-conventional instruments to achieve their long-term goals.
My immediate career aspiration is becoming a Product Manager or combining Project Manager/Business Analyst roles as a preliminary goal.
An enthusiastic mentor/supervisor will be a huge positive factor.
I am not looking for a position of a mindless communication node.