"What are we actually paying this person for?" Sometimes... It is a fair question. Most people, unfortunately, use it badly.
Once a year, I sit with a version of it myself. Not the salary, not the title, but something harder to put on a payslip.
What difference did I make, and how would things have gone without me?
I mentioned in another article that I use a note-taking system to highlight a few of the contributions I made to the projects I was working on, and try to be very specific about the things that are not easily showcased in a "project overview".
Because, of course, many of those will not be quite clear. For example, if I took the lead to avoid a big project risk or remove an impediment, or the way I negotiated a scope trade-off with a stakeholder, etc
However, there was a point in my career when I learned a term from economists that supported this whole thinking about "project management ROI": Utility.
Utility is one of those words that sounds academic until it describes your normal Tuesday morning.
In economics, utility is the satisfaction or benefit you get from something. It is personal, it shifts with the moment, and it almost never matches the price tag.
Picture the first coffee of the day. You are tired, foggy, three emails behind. That three-dollar cup feels close to priceless.
Now picture the third cup. Same coffee, same price, far less benefit. Economists call this diminishing marginal utility, the idea that each extra unit of the same thing gives you a little less than the one before.
The lesson hiding in there is simple. Value is not a fixed property of the thing. It depends on what it does for someone, at a specific moment, under specific pressure.
A project manager is worth thinking about the same way.
Some of what we deliver is easy to count.
A project kept on time and on budget. Scope creep stopped before it quietly doubled the work. A vendor rate renegotiated. These land in numbers a CFO recognizes, and the numbers can be large.
The data backs the instinct. PMI's research, through the Salary Survey and the Pulse of the Profession, keeps pointing the same way: organizations lean harder on project management precisely because complex work fails expensively without it.
I think about one project that taught me this the hard way.
After enough digging and a few honest conversations, the math became clear. Finishing it would burn more than a million dollars on something that was not going to work.
My recommendation was to cancel. Stop it. Not a popular thing to say in a room that had already spent and promised.
But it helped executives make a decision, freed the money, the people, and the calendar for work that had a real chance.
Here is where the spreadsheet runs out of room...
A team that trusts each other solves problems faster. A risk caught early never becomes the crisis everyone remembers. A confused goal made clear on a Tuesday saves a hundred small wrong turns later. None of that lands cleanly in a budget line. All of it changes how a project ends.
Not only what we deliver, but how. The same result can leave a team burned out and quietly job-hunting, or steady and willing to do it again.
How we deliver shapes whether anyone wants to work with us a second time. That part rarely makes the performance review. It is often the most durable value we create.
How to Catch Your Own Impact Before You Forget It
The trouble with utility is that it is forgettable, especially your own.
By December, you cannot remember the March decision that saved the project delivery. So I keep a running note I have kept for years, sometimes a plain file where I drop the moments that mattered as they happen.
If you want to track your own, a few honest categories help:
- Cost and budget: the savings you drove, the scope creep you stopped, the variance you can actually point to.
- Time: the deadlines you protected and the process fixes that shaved real days off delivery.
- Risk: the crises that never happened because you saw them coming, counted as cost avoided.
- People: the morale you held up, the trust you built, the turnover that did not happen on your watch.
- Communication: the decisions that moved faster because stakeholders understood where things really stood.
They are evidence, the kind you want in your hand during a performance conversation, when good work rarely speaks for itself.
The Better Question
Most organizations ask what a project manager costs. Far fewer ask the question that matters more: how much worse off would we be without one?
Measured well, a good project manager tends to create more value than they ever take home. That is not a flattering story we tell ourselves. It is the arithmetic of utility, applied to a role that spends most of its time preventing the disasters nobody ends up seeing.
So maybe the year-end question is worth stealing. Not what you were paid, but this:
If your seat had been empty all year, what would have gone wrong that nobody would have thought to blame on the absence?
Posted on: July 08, 2026 01:00 AM |
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