Meet our open source champions: Diane Chalmers, Project Manager

My journey has had a lot of twist and turns, and in a funny way each role has led to the next. When I first graduated from university and joined IBM, I took a Test role. I loved it! I was able to learn so much about the offering that I tested and I enjoyed that big picture view that I was able to have. I also enjoyed documenting the processes we used and created a getting started guide for others newly new hired in our area. The team I was on then moved into doing a rotation between test, development, and support. My passion was still with testing and I found myself as an SVT lead for WebSphere Migration. Again, I found myself doing a lot of documentation around our processes and someone mentioned Project Management to me. I was hooked right away! My first Project Management role was working with the IBM Support Assistant team, and I stayed with that wonderful team for many years. From there I was moved into a role focused around internal communication for our Support Transformation efforts, which won IBM multiple awards. Once that initiative was well underway, I found myself wanting to get back into more Project Management. That’s when I came back to the WebSphere team.

During my career at IBM I’ve worked on a lot of offerings that are more tool-like in nature. What I mean is that they are offered for free to help IBM customers. A couple of examples are IBM Support Assistant and the WebSphere Migration Toolkit. During the course of development, there is often open source code that the team wants to use when developing a feature. I’ve always been a supporter of using open source within our offerings once it clears some internal checks. Open source is great because of the variety of people who get involved, each person brings a different perspective to make the open source better. For example, you may have students, professors, large corporations, and small business people all coming together to accomplish a common goal and yet still bringing their unique view. I think that’s the power and strength of open source.

Typically Project Managers are good organizers and communicators with an attention to detail. These skills can be valuable to open source projects and communities. So even if a Project Manager isn’t able to contribute code they can still play a key role in its success. Project Managers have a lot of experience with scheduling and ensuring work is done on time. We like to establish a cadence for our projects, which includes backlog review, planning, scrum calls, playbacks, and retrospectives. We also like to ensure that we’ve addressed all compliance work items such as legal and security compliance. Personally, I’ve also been involved in a lot of communication activities such as meetings with sponsor users for feedback on our Minimum Viable Product (MVP), publishing blogs, and social media drives. All of this can be extremely useful for open-source projects!

An open source project is a great way for students to get their feet wet with developing in the real world. They’ll get to learn about pain points for their consumers and experience what it’s like to work with people with various backgrounds. It’s also a great way for students to start to make connections outside of their normal circles. 

For me personally, I’ve always been one to push myself into uncomfortable situations when I know that I’ll grow from the experience. That’s not to say that I wasn’t scared to death in some of those situations, but they’ve always worked out for the best. So my advice is to take the leap, take the risk …​ you’ll grow and learn from it, which is a good thing!