What the Project Life Cycle Can Teach Us About a PM Career

Following 20 years at a large Canadian telecommunications firm, Bruce established the project management consulting firm Solutions Management Inc (SMI). Since 1999, he has provided contract project/program management services, been a source for project management support personnel and created/delivered courses to over 7,000 participants in Canada, the United States and England.

  Career Development  

Most project managers can recite the phases of a project life cycle without thinking: initiate, plan, execute (with some monitoring and controlling), close. We teach it. We live it. We enforce it. It becomes so familiar that we rarely question whether it applies anywhere beyond the work itself.

Over time, I have come to believe it applies just as cleanly to a career in project management as it does to any formal project we manage. The challenge is that while most project managers are disciplined about closing projects, far fewer are intentional about closing phases of their own professional lives.

I say that as someone who has had more than one career, and who continues to evolve from delivery roles into sponsorship, governance, and public leadership. I have initiated, planned, executed, and closed more projects than I can count.

I am still learning how to do the same with my career.

Initiation: Choosing the Work, Not Just the Role

Career initiation is rarely as formal as project initiation. There is no charter. No sponsor. No business case. For many of us, it begins almost accidentally.

In my case, project management emerged through telecom, IT and large-scale organizational work. The early focus was not on becoming a project manager, but on getting difficult things done in environments that needed structure, coordination and accountability. Only later did …

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