Program management is an interesting discipline at Microsoft – it was when I first joined the company, it remains so now. It is a role that requires good "soft skills" ("I'm a people person"), good prioritization skills, good analysis skills, good presentation skills, and being able to walk that Zen line of "good enough" when shipping product. It's half art, half science, half Buddhist monk, half evangelist (arithmetic skills aren't really a requirement, though). It is a neat role that you don't see at a lot of other places – you'll see the title Program Manager, or Project Manager, but it is rare that you see Microsoft Program Management in action (although, as Rick points out, occasionally the more feature-happy Program Managers need to be put in their place).
I was never a Program Manager at Microsoft, I started as a Technical Evangelist (technical marketing) and then transitioned to a software development role and worked my way from there. I made the jump to general management in April of 1998, but I was still fairly heavily development biased in my thinking. My self-selected career track of leaving Microsoft to start a company really threw me into the realm of Program Management for the first time. Investors, customers, employees – that list of skills I mention up front turns out to be REALLY handy. Over the past 7 1/2 years, I've found that one can Program Manage anything to get the results one wants. I'd been doing it unconsciously for the first 35 years of my life, but once one is doing it consciously, watch out. It helped me navigate everything from raising money during the most hostile environment to startups in a long time to navigating the halls of a media company.
About seven months ago, my (just turned) six year old son was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. We got lucky in that he didn't end up hospitalized – normally, how you find out your pancreas has stopped producing insulin is that you start to lose weight and you get really sick. But he had his six year checkup a week after he had started to wet the bed out of the blue, so we mentioned the bed wetting to the doctor, and bam – one urine test and a trip to the hospital later, we had our diagnosis. His blood glucose levels were north of 450 (60-120 is normal for non-diabetics) and his A1C result was 8.2% (<6% is normal for a non-diabetic, good control for a diabetic is < 7%). Point blood glucose tests tell you how you are doing at any given moment, but they tell you nothing about the hours in between. A1C really is the ultimate metric – it is your body's memory of how your blood sugars have been behaving. So the 8.2% showed us that while his initial blood glucose reading of 450+ was wildly high, it hadn't been wildly high for the past 3 months – just way too high.
Anyway, after the initial shock was over, I set about in a methodical way to understand how his body used carbohydrates and how it consumed the injected insulin, and to put in place a discipline and a methodology to really manage his diabetes. I did a ton of research up front (and continue to this day). An Access database was born, along with a tightly watched and tweaked rhythm for eating and exercising. Far more than the suggested minimum number of daily blood glucose readings became part of the program – after all, the pancreas does it continuously, so the more the information we have to help us substitute for the pancreas, the better. Part of the fun along the way was the evangelism of doctors and nurses to get the extra supplies we need (I am a huge fan of redundancy and long term planning). A lot of questioning and pushing back against medical advice that didn't fit what I was seeing in the patterns of the numbers was a big part of the fun – although we have switched to Children's Hospital in Seattle where the staff seems much more knowledgeable and much more willing to listen to reason, so I'm having to deal with less crap now. Every day is a day that something could go wrong and every day requires careful attention, but we are really in the zone now.
Once every 3 months, we have to take our son to Children's for a checkup. Today was that day. The travel and the appointment take about a half-day all told, and they poke, they prod, they ask questions – oh, and they measure his A1C. Today it was 5.8%
You can Program Manage anything.
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While writing this, I was listening to "Lookin' Out My Backdoor" by Creedence Clearwater Revival 
. So this time around, I got time on people's schedules, which was a much more effective way of actually getting time with people. (yes, it is true, I am a time management genius). But that meant that I was completely booked up for two straight days, followed by today's marathon - back-to-back meetings from 9:30 to 5:30, followed by a mad dash in rush hour traffic to my father-in-laws 70th birthday gathering. 
I keep cables in the trunk of every car in the family.
I also keep a small set of wrenches and sockets in the trunk.
BMWs have such a toolkit mounted on the inside of the trunklid. I no longer own a BMW, but I learned the lesson: having a set of tools handy is good.
If for some weird unknown reason I didn't have jumpers in the trunk, I could have grabbed the wrenches and swapped batteries with the wife's car.
OR, here's a trick - loosen your cables, tap them to the wife's battery to start the car, leave it running off the alternator for seconds while you bolt your battery back in place. It's bad to run for any length of time with no battery, it stresses diodes in the alternator, but in a pinch that's one way around the problem.
Of course this doesn't work if you have a Chrysler - some of those require changing the battery through the wheel well - that is, remove the tire to get the battery out.
Posted by: vmarks | March 8, 2008 11:06 AM