How to Gain Project Management Experience in Unexpected Ways

Bruce is the founder of ProjectManagementHacks.com, a resource for growing IT project managers.

  Career Development  

What if the way we think about project management experience is all wrong? I was inspired to explore this idea thanks to a fascinating quote by Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges:

“A writer—and, I believe, generally all persons—must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.”

You may not see yourself as an artist, poet or author. Yet Borges’s insight applies to real-world project management. In that spirit, I’d like to share a few experiences that illustrate gaining project management insight from other contexts.

Stepping Into the Shoes of a Project Sponsor
As project managers, we spend a lot of time engaging project sponsors. To paraphrase Morpheus’s famous lines from The Matrix: Project sponsors are the gatekeepers. They guard all the doors, and they hold all the keys.

This year, I had the opportunity to put on the hat of a project sponsor when I was elected to the board of directors for my condominium corporation (analogous to a homeowner’s association in the United States). In this new role, I interact with the property manager, review financial …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.