So You Think You Are A Real Project Manager?
- Justin M
- 3 days ago
- 13 min read
Project management is a field of practice over 60 years old that is evolving based on changes in business environments and technological advancements. The desire to become a project manager or pivot into project management is increasing with the rise of social media.
Incidentally, there is also a growing number of new coaches and trainers who are working to increase the number of project practitioners year over year to meet future market demands.
But while we have an increase in demand on both sides of the spectrum, some of these career coaches are perpetuating some dangerous ideas in order to help transition people into the world of project management.
One of those ideas is becoming increasingly popular, so much so, that is causing irreversible damage to the reputation of the project management field and the quality of practitioners.
Here is one prominent example:
"If you planned a wedding or travel, you are a project manager."
Such a simple statement and yet it leads to large unintended consequences.
To illustrate why I find the statement incredibly offensive and outlandish, we have some buried assumptions we must unpack.
Here in nutshell is the layered thinking:
Planning a wedding or travel is considered a regular activity in life.
If regular life activities are classified as projects, then most people will manage at least one project in their lifetime.
If managing a project makes someone a project manager then over time, everyone is a project manager.
If everyone is a project manager then why do we have a specific field of study? Why are there certifications for the role? Why do we require experience in order to take on the role if it is readily accessible through daily life?
In my career I have worked with an array of project professionals, some talented, some who had no idea what they were doing. Part of the cluelessness in their role comes from unearned confidence from misinformed statements and the precedent they set.
But before we unpack this further, lets revisit some commonly agreed ideas and set a baseline for the rest of this article.
First and foremost, The Project Management Institute (PMI), a proclaimed global standard for the field of project management, defines a project as:
"A temporary initiative in a unique context undertaken to create value."
This definition is not radically new from previous iterations, but what you will quickly notice is that word value has replaced product/service or result. Additionally the word value is ambiguous and open ended with no clear definition as to what value means.
Value is a combination of objective utility and subjective perception.
So, in order for us to illustrate the damage of equating an activity like wedding planning as project management, we need to refine the definition of project value.
Based on my nearly 20 years of project management experience in complex initiatives, we will define project value as:
Helping a business in the four main mechanisms of business survival and growth:
Increasing or protecting revenue.
Controlling or reducing costs.
Limiting or mitigating liability or risk.
Improving or changing market position.
What you will quickly notice, is that based on this definition, a project should be oriented towards the value it brings to a business. Yet a wedding or travel arrangements is more around personal value. Therefore, any other project outside of a business project will be regarded as a personal project (for the remainder of this article).
Now lets revisit the wedding activity from above.
A wedding planning activity (or the like) as a personal project can be used to demonstrate project management experience, but here in lies some traps that can limit or impeded your career we need to discuss.
There are three primary traps:
The stark differences between personal and business projects.
An emphasis on the wrong skills from personal projects.
Valuing all project management experience equally.
Let us deep dive into each of these traps so we can see the damages they can leave on a career.
Five Primary Differences Between a Business and Personal Projects
At the surface, you can see that a personal project has some common similarities. Some of these common elements include there are plans, budgets, bodies of work (scope), and teams of people to work toward an end goal.
But when you compare a personal project against a business project, there are five stark differences we should look at:
Value created
Decision making authority
Politics and managing competing interests
Duration of impact
Business knowledge required
Value
Personal projects are created and executed with the sole purpose of self-satisfaction. When you plan a travel/a wedding/a move, you are coordinating an experience for yourself and or your inner group. While a business project is working to facilitate the capture of business value defined by the project sponsor, as aforementioned to address the mechanisms of business survival.
This makes scope or a body of work rather simple. In a personal project, scope does not relatively change or expand compared to a business project. Moreover, a personal project does not create value for a business.
When someone states they are a practicing or experienced project manager, there is an expectation that they are able to manage scope deviations or challenges that can directly impact the value to be created from an initiative. This is not a one time activity but throughout the project.
There is also a semblance of proactivity and tact implied with the title of a project manager. This includes tying scope deviations or considerations to the intended business outcomes defined.
What you will find in a personal project is that tact is not generally employed, as you are the primary benefactor of the value to be created. While business projects have different levels of benefactors from the front line all the way up to board members.
The problem becomes clear, that those who manage only a personal project lack a demonstrated depth in skill around scope management, scope creep and the principles behind value mapping against multiple facets of a business.
But scope is not the only difference, there is of course the governance.
Decision making authority
When you are running your own personal project, all the authority and decision-making is on you or your own in-group. You do not carry the formal title or role of project management but all the decisions to continue, to stop, or approve activity is within your control or direct influence. In a personal project, you have the ability to make any decisions you want at any point in time and incur the ramifications of those decisions (assuming no vendor contract limitations).
Compare that to a business project, a project manager has little to no authority to make decisions. They are facilitating action or decisions through timely curated information. In fact, you may have primary & secondary decision makers. Those two parties can can also have people who can directly or indirectly influence decision makers. This makes the power dynamics not always readily known or as centralized compared to a personal project.
When someone has only managed a personal project, they have not spent much time trying read subtext or informal/indirect lines of power and influence. They also have not needed to respect a decision despite not agreeing with it.
It can make it incredibly complex for a someone who calls themselves a project manager who has never had to hold people accountable for their own decisions and responsibilities without any directly authority to fire them, or initiate any commercial disputes compared to a personal project.
Make no mistake even as a business project (whether internal or not), there is some commercial discussion but it is not as quick or with limited parties compared to personal project.
This is likely why stakeholder mapping, and decision-making governance set up becomes increasingly challenging. A personal project does not require it at that level or depth. When someone moves into a project management role without that level of understanding or experience; they tend to neglect building a solid foundation for projects which can decelerate decision-making or leave out key individuals which can erode business value.
Building off the power dynamics and decision-making authority, we arrive to one of the most compelling differences between a personal and business project. This is also one of the most difficult concepts to learn if not directly exposed to it, and that is organizational politics.
Politics & managing competing interests
The depth of politics in a personal project is contained to once again your own inner group and relationship dynamics. A vendor you hire may have their own vested interest to maximize their revenue or entice repeated business, but there is no historical background between you two or some secondary or hidden agenda (generally speaking). You may also have to wrestle in between your own family or personal relationships but again that is rather contained (based on your own authority).
Reviewing our wedding example, you don't need to negotiate among different competing interests, all the stakeholders are solely selected and hired for your benefit or within your direct influence. With regard to vendors, you are paying for a service or product as a transaction from mutual understanding and will be held accountable to the terms and conditions that were previously agreed to. Family/fiends you can apply pressure among other members or dismiss them outright.
Now in contrast, you are going to find that a business project has primary, secondary and tertiary levels of politics and interests. For projects are operating within an organization, and each organization has a different department with its own P&L (profit and loss) or strategic agendas and or political ones as well. You then have different senior leaders who have their own political and personal agendas to layer on top of that, which may include building social and influence for future career aspirations. Layer this with any vendors who you need to collaborate with, and their existing histories; some vendors may be actively working to replace you or compete for future bodies of work you would like to be involved in.
You can quickly see the complexity of managing a business project aligns well with the decision-making authority/governance piece. You are working to build relationships and navigate complex contexts with little or no guidance. Additionally, the competing interests may not always be known or revealed to you.
But if you are coming strictly from a personal project, the politics is rather limited and rather well known. Again it creates this false sense of understanding to a project manager who has not been exposed to working with stakeholders who may been working against your best interests or have ulterior motives that require some finesse to elicit.
This neatly brings us to another big variance between personal and business projects; the time horizon views.
Duration of impact
The decisions/actions made during a personal project are relatively contained in terms of time horizon. Personal projects are either in the present or near future in terms of impact.
However when we look at a business project, these types of projects have short-term and long-term horizons to consider. This is because a business project is driving change to an organization either to a subset of team members or the organization as a whole. These changes go through phases:
During the project.
Immediately after the close of the project.
The time period long after the project has closed.
When we look at a personal project, we do not need to think about the ramifications of action or inaction to the depth or consideration compared to a business project. The consequences in a business project can include culture shifts or changes in business operations; while a personal project such as a wedding generally ends after the event has concluded (there are residual effects but not to the same caliber).
This equips a personal project manager with a very limited lens of causal relationship thinking, which is absolutely critical to leading both projects and moving into more senior roles in a career.
When you have experience of looking at short and long-term decisions, actions or inactions, you become more knowledgeable in layered thinking. This type of thinking allows you to identify and mitigate risks or issues that threaten potential value capture, and create plans with deeper understanding of upstream and downstream dependencies.
But in order to do that effectively, we have one more difference that we need to cover; that is the concept of business acumen.
Business knowledge requirements
The nature of a personal project from our definition above, does not include value to be derived in a business context. As such, personal projects do not require a fundamental understanding around business operations or how its functions cooperate together to grow.
Revisiting our earlier wedding example, from our personal perspective we are not concerned with how each of our vendors operate, but rather that they meet our expectations. Each friend/family member either as a participant or contributor does not require understanding about a business either.
Compare that to a business project. Now you need to understand broader concepts in order to build on our causal relationship and systems thinking we notated in the previous section.
We need to look at a project with an interdisciplinary view:
People
Process
Technology
Data
Furthermore, we need to layer that against business acumen concepts such as the net income equation (Revenue minus expenses); and the business value chain.
The more we understand a business's industry, market and internal operations; the more we can make facilitate discussion or consolidate informed recommendations that are tailored to fit the needs of the business. This holistic view works to maximize intended business value further.
What you will find is that a personal project manager does not apply interdisciplinary thinking; which can cause a distortion in terms of expectations and capability.
When someone claims to be a project manager responsible for protecting business value but cannot explain how value is created across functions, departments, or the broader organization, they leave significant gaps in their ability to advocate for the project's intended outcomes.
The key to becoming a trusted business advocate, is building credibility through strong relationships and demonstrating the judgment to know when to intervene and when to step back.
When we rely solely on personal projects, we do not have the depth of understanding to accurately build up to this expectation.. and that is a recipe for failure.
A quick recap
From our first primary trap we covered that a personal project impresses project management concepts that build unearned confidence or lack of complex understanding around human psychology and business operations.
In summary a personal project fails to build knowledge on:
Managing complex scope, scope creep and multi-layered value mapping.
Co-creating robust governance frameworks and conducting thorough stakeholder mapping.
Navigating power and influence among different stakeholders who may have competing interests.
Looking at projects in both the short-term and long-term horizons.
Understanding how a business operates.
Now that we have established the distinction between personal and business projects and its implications for the project management profession, let's examine the second major trap.
Emphasis on the Wrong Skills
When we talk about the skills on personal projects, in order to pivot or enter into project management, what do coaches focus on most?
The transferrable skills.
Transferrable skills rarely are project management focused but broader skills that can apply across different industries, and professions.
Commonly among career coaches in project management, you will find the following abilities highlighted:
Be organized.
Take notes.
Track progress and follow-up with people.
Generate reports.
Communicate changes and tailor messaging to audiences.
Manage stakeholder groups.
Time management.
Risk management.
Logistics & and team coordination.
Problem solving.
If you have been following my work/posts for sometime, you are going to notice something terribly wrong here.
This is the second most damning problem that can affect career trajectory.
Personal projects emphasize more project support related activities and responsibilities (administrative, analyst or coordinator), not actual project management. It sends signals to hiring teams and to boarder networks that the experience a project manager supposedly holds is more akin to a junior project manager or associate positions.
There is not a strong emphasis on leadership or strategy and for good reason.
Business project management is first and foremost tasked with protecting the value defined by a project sponsor, this requires proactive curation of information to facilitate action or decision making. This means that the project manager is working with subject matter experts to translate context to the right audiences and present tradeoffs with a solid recommendation.
In addition, business project managers are building a project strategy in order to execute on a project plan, this requires defining an approach, selecting tools, and utilized defined resources or collaborating with different team members. This becomes increasingly complex when the team members are not designated solely to your project but are shared across departments.
Business project managers also are working to grow their core team into becoming self managing and deputized participants in actively working to protect the project's value. As the impact of not achieving that defined value is not just reflected in the project manager's success or the project sponsors business case, but rather the team's collective contributions. This means that a project manager is indirectly influencing team member's career paths and their livelihoods.
As we saw above, the dynamics of a personal project limit the opportunity to demonstrate concepts such as servant leadership. This is due to the complexity and power structure that a personal project holds compared to a business one.
Which means that those who become business project managers from personal projects lack experience in leading in ambiguous contexts and have a fundamental difference in terms of expectations. They will focus on the support or passive roles in a project rather than strategic and leadership components.
This leaves us with the final primary trap in using personal projects for career aspirations, the mistake of treating all projects the same.
Treating All Project Management Experience As Equal
Personal projects rarely exceed a budget of a few thousands of dollars, and have stakeholders roughly under 100 people involved or less. As we have notated above, the complexity of a personal project and the decision-making authority is centralized and not layered with hidden agendas.
Comparatively, business project budgets have a very high upper range. You can have projects in the $100's of millions, all the way down to below a $100K. Because of this variability, the stakeholders can be as small as a 10 people all the way to 100's of thousands of people across the globe.
When we treat that scale as equal regardless of industry, specification or context; we apply assumptions or expectations to base skillsets which can set project managers to fail before they get started.
Traps in Project Management Should Not Deter You, But Be Wise In Your Career Planning
Be aware that there are plenty of opportunities in the project management space.
However,
Not everything should be deemed a project, and not everyone has been or is a project manager.
When you are aware of the nuances or the expectations that come with a project management title, it not only helps guide your career path but also limits the amount of career coaches who can take advantage of you in a highly competitive market.
This does not mean you cannot enter the field of project management (no gatekeeping), but be aware of the pervasive idea that project management exists everywhere, as it is harming your opportunity to be successful in a growing and demanding field of practice.
Above all else, continue to practice discernment and critical thinking skills... especially in a world where AI is overutilized.
The realities between a personal project and a business project is vast and if not respected will not only harm your opportunities but also set you up for project failure.
As with everything you do, first get clear on your goals, determine the requirements needed and identify the gaps.
They key is to not take everything you see or hear at face value.
Cheers 🎩
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Pragintion PM, we specialize in bvusiness advoacy driven project management.
Our program & project management services are grounded in a pragmatic, intentional approach delivered through a client-validated methodology that gets results.
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