Showing Your Value as a Project Manager

Paul has run a plethora of projects in multiple industries throughout his 20-year career, ranging from process improvement to agile to most recently cyber-security. Paul is also a reputable speaker, drawing practical and humorous conclusions from the "trenches" of his employers. Paul's dedication as a PM practitioner started decades ago, when he became one of the first 10,000 people to earn the PMP.

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Topics: Career Development, Cost Management

We just went through that time of the year when project managers have to convey our value to our employers via the performance appraisal process. Much like writing a resume, we record our project successes and milestone achievements that are most resident in memories for the past year.

It’s easy for us to claim how our successful delivery of a project’s objectives contributed to revenue growth or cost reduction. After all, if our sponsors didn’t believe our projects wouldn’t derive benefit, they wouldn’t employ us to ensure delivery and its resulting benefits realization.

Yet outside of overall project and benefit delivery, can you report on how your one single action yielded a direct, tangible benefit? Can you claim value beyond the benefit the project was intended to deliver? I did, and here’s my story.

Few of us have a pure project management role in our companies today. While we exclusively own the domain of scope, schedule and budget, we are usually responsible for some element of product ownership or ongoing support, both during and after the project. I maintained an ongoing product responsibility in a multi-year program to secure my company’s data with multi-factor authentication.

Not wanting to slow down the momentum of MFA adoption, I took on and maintained the responsibility for physical token distribution. Each …

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