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PM Lessons From Waiting Tables
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My first two years in college I worked as a waiter in the local version of a well-known family restaurant chain, located in a rather large shopping mall. I had been working there bussing tables right after graduating high school, and was genuinely surprised at the promotion – this particular franchise had only hired waitresses previously. I worked weekday nights and weekends during the school year, while carrying a “full-time” load at school, so I kept pretty busy. The whole time I was doing it, though, I remember thinking that, as soon as I could get a college degree, I would then get a “real” job, and all of the unpleasant aspects of working in a family restaurant – wildly varying work load, difficult customers, low pay, having to constantly clean tables, seats, work surfaces – would be a thing of the past. It wasn’t until much later that I came to realize that working in that environment gave me valuable insights into the world of management in general, and Project Management in particular. My first surprise was the drop in my hourly pay rate. As a busboy, I was making around $2.65 per hour. But, as a “tip-eligible” employee, that rate dropped, I think it was by more than a dollar. It wasn’t a big deal, I would soon realize, since making more than one dollar per hour in tips was usually fairly easy. Lesson #1: Your employer is probably going to pay you the least amount that they possibly can while still having the job performed. Next surprise had to do with how much of an impact the others on the team have on your ability to attain success. I don’t know if this is the nominal model for managing the dining area of restaurants – I assume it is – but this one divided its tables into clusters called “sections,” and the head waitress would assign your section at the beginning of your shift. Of course, some sections would tend to be more tip-generating than others, and were highly coveted. My expectation that section assignment would be on some sort of rotation was immediately overturned: it was obvious that the higher-tipping areas (those six-table clusters that would be filled before others) were being assigned to the head waitress’ favorites – and I was not one of those. Also in-play was the behavior of the cashier/hostess, who would seat customers at specific tables. Make her mad, and she would alternately seat nobody in your section, or fill all six tables at once (“bombing”), making the providing good service to any of them almost impossible. Lesson #2: The other people in the organization can enhance or ruin your chances at success, even if it does not appear that they occupy a position that would enable them to do so. My solution? Get better by learning more, presenting cleaner and happier, and working harder. I continued for some time on the head waitress’ no-friend list, but the manager noticed the change. Before long I was being scheduled to “open” the restaurant, the earliest possible schedule slot, meaning that I had to be assigned to the main sections. Soon my tip income increased to the point that not all of my textbooks had to be bought from the used shelf, and I could actually go out on a date from time to time. Lesson #3: If you make the customers happy, the rest of the organization will perceive you very differently than if you don’t, which I consider to be a rather PM-centric phenomena. Perhaps the harshest of lessons: Some of the others in the organization, even if they present as friends, will betray you for even the slightest advantage. A few of the waitresses who had initially congratulated me on becoming the first waiter in that particular franchise were among the first (and worst) when it came to alerting the head waitress of any mistake I made or flaw they observed, no matter how trivial. So that leads to... Lesson #4: Be stingy with your trust. Lesson #5: The use of ex parte discussions to harm the reputations of workplace rivals is by no means confined to the office environment. I eventually became aware that my near-desperate attempts to get on the headwaitress’ good side were perceived by her to be an indication of a lack of character on my part. Late one afternoon, when business was slow, I found myself standing behind the “fountain,” the workspace that had the coffee machines, soda dispensers, juice and ice tea containers, a sink, and a clear view of most of the tables in the restaurant, when the headwaitress came up and stood beside me. After a long moment, and seemingly out of the blue, she turned to me and said “If it’s one thing I can’t stand, it's wishy-washy people.” I immediately recognized that she was, of course, talking about me. Without missing a beat, I replied “Well, you know, I can take them or leave them.” The headwaitress struggled mightily to maintain her usual stern look for a few seconds, but then burst out laughing. We were friends from that point on, leading to the final takeaway... Lesson #6: Don’t take workplace conflict personally. |
Posted on: February 17, 2026 09:54 PM
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Career Development In A PM-Hostile Environment
| I rather envy those whose Project Management career trajectory happened in an organization that valued the practices and techniques of PM, and could provide a stable and reliable path forward over the long term within the industry. Or, rather, I should say that I would envy those people if they, in fact, existed. Cynical? Maybe. It’s just that in the strong majority of organizations where I’ve been employed in a PM- or PM-derivative role, the truly stellar PMOs would eventually fall to executives who were, to some degree or another, hostile towards PM practices and techniques. In organizations with mediocre (or even lame) PMOs, the zeitgeist was, at best, neutral tolerance masquerading as acceptance. In between these two extremes are probably the most dangerous organizations for attempting to advance a career in Project Management, those that appear to be amenable towards it on the surface, but are, in reality, rather resentful of the whole codex. But before I go into what strategies might be effective for advancing a career in these environs, I want to explore the ways that a given company might be gauged as to its willingness or capacity to graft PM practices into its existing business model. The answers to the following multiple-choice questions might be highly instructive to discovering this key parameter. 1.At your job interview, when the HR Director asks if you have any questions for them, and you ask where the PMO Director’s office is situated, the response is: a. Two doors down from the CEO, in the executive suite. b. One floor down from the CEO, and one floor above the Facility Manager’s. c. In a transportable building near the parking lot. d. What’s a PMO? 2.Where and when are the Project Review Meetings held? a. The third working day of each month, in the executive boardroom. b. Sometime during the second week of each month, when the PMO Director wants to have them, held in the Main Floor Conference Room. c. It depends on when the Chief Financial Officer closes the books – usually by mid-month, and held in the warehouse after most of the staff has gone home for the day. d. Down the street at Bob’s Bar and Grill, after some project or other has gone completely off the rails, and we’re trying to figure out who to blame. 3.How are Estimates at Completion (EACs) derived? a. The average of the three most accurate formulae listed in the NAVSEA Estimate at Completion study, depending on how far along the specific Project is. b. Just the Budget at Completion divided by the Cost Performance Index. c. We re-estimate the remaining work, add that to the cumulative actuals, and go with that. d. One of the Control Account Managers who shows up at Bob’s, the one who just lost a bar bet about drawing a square with three lines, gives us his “expert opinion.” 4.What are your minimum qualifications for a Project Controls Manager? a. We prefer a Masters’ Degree, in Business or some technical area, and at least one certification, ideally a PMP®, with at least ten years in the profession. b. College degree, cert is a plus, but not required. Five years in the field, knows how to drive a Critical Path Methodology software package, and has generated a Cost Performance Report in Format 1. c. A good administrative worker, who knows how to conduct a Performance Review. d. The CEO’s nephew/niece, who needs a managerial role. If the answer was D to any of the above, or even an occasional C, you’re probably in a PM-hostile environment. What to do now? First off, don’t put on airs. Give absolutely nobody any reason whatsoever to resent what you’re trying to bring to the organization. You’re there to offer a service, even if it’s one they don’t realize they desperately need, and confronting execs with evidence that they’re messing up, even if you are 100% right, is counter-productive in the extreme. Next, you should know that your most powerful information stream stems from the calculated EAC. Amazingly, this can be derived with just two data points: the specific Project’s cumulative actual costs, and an estimate of their percent complete. Divide the cumulative actuals by that percent complete, and you have a fairly accurate EAC. Compare this EAC to the Project’s Budget at Completion (BAC), and you have management information gold: the projected Variance at Completion. Using those VACs from the Projects showing a major overrun, but have not informed upper management that they are in trouble, is your key. If you are the person informing the execs where they are in Project Portfolio trouble, when everyone else is saying everything is fine, you almost instantaneously become indispensable, haters notwithstanding. And the payback for all of the organizational hostility you’ve had to deal with comes about on those occasions when you can document that the PMs of the Projects with the highest negative calculated Variances at Completion are the same ones making your corporate life difficult. |
Posted on: February 11, 2026 09:53 PM
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Key Career Development Insight: Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum
| The Latin part of this blog’s title, roughly, if you want peace, prepare for war, is attributed to Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus[i], though even George Washington used a derivative of it during his first address to a joint session of Congress, in 1790.[ii] My interpretation: if one desires their country to be at peace, then that country had better be prepared to defend that peace. What does all of this have to do with career development within the PM realm (ProjectManagement.com’s theme for January), GTIM Nation may ask? Well, I’ll tell you. Meanwhile, Back In The Project Management World… I have to believe that the point of developing one’s career – particularly within the management sciences – is to get to a place where your mastery of the techniques and philosophies of management can be appropriately (if not excessively) monetized, for the economic security of yourself and your loved ones, sure, but also to have left a contribution to the advancement of said management sciences (which, if we’re being frank, is measured by its economic success). Okay, fine, but how do we get there? To paraphrase the Latin part of the title, if you want to be a leader within PM, first become an excellent servant. I once worked with a colleague – I’ll call him Dan – who had two particularly interesting interactions that are very illustrative. The company we worked for was medium-sized, but had encountered a sudden growth spurt, and had to convert its main conference room into a cubicle farm. These cubes were tiny, too, and Dan had been assigned to one. One morning a young woman arrived to move in to the cubicle across from Dan. She was the daughter of the company’s new Chief Executive Officer, freshly graduated from college with a business degree. As they got to know each other, as Dan would later tell me, it became obvious that this young lady had very high expectations of her career path, indeed. She was, in fact, appalled at both her office conditions as well as her relative placement within the organization. Keep in mind she had just graduated. She showed little knowledge of the company’s primary technical capabilities, its business practices or techniques, nor did she seem inclined to learn them. Her sense of entitlement was not just annoying, it was positively blinding her to the path that she would need to recognize and ultimately embrace – that her (corporate) worth had little to do with her degree or lineage, and more to do with her ability to provide a service to others. That would, in the long term, determine whether or not some PM would be willing to bring her onto the Project Team as they pursued the scope in front of them. Sure, her father being the CEO would, umm, encourage some PMs to give her a charge code; but, should she fail to deliver anything other than diatribes on how everyone else was getting it wrong (i.e., disagreed with her professors), even these would eventually seek to distance themselves from her. I ended up moving on from this particular nepotism-addled company before Dan did, and had actually lost contact with him when, some years later, I was surprised to receive a phone call from him. He had moved on to some type of utility company that had hired Dan to set up their brand-new Project Management Office. Unfortunately, his “honeymoon” period had come to an abrupt end. Apparently the executive who had hired him had a level of enthusiasm for PM that was not shared by the others in the management team, making even the simplest of implementation attempts insanely difficult, if not impossible. I could tell by the tone of his voice that he was wound up pretty tight, too. “You need to provide an information stream that’s indispensable to the anti-PM crowd.” “Thanks, Captain Obvious. How exactly can I do that? They won’t even consider creating a Work Breakdown Structure!” While I was pretty good at setting up critical PM-based information streams, I had never done it under conditions analogous to an organizational behavior and performance emergency room. I don’t remember precisely what I told him at that time. In retrospect, I should have advised the following tactics: ·Pull some targeted projects’ total budget from the general ledger. ·Get access to their cumulative actual costs by month. ·Find a way to pull an estimate of their percent complete, also by month. ·Create an Estimate at Completion for each project by dividing the cumulative actuals by the percent complete. ·Create a histogram that compares the Budget at Completion and the EAC, and sort it in order of largest negative Variance at Completion to largest positive. ·Send this report to the exec who initiated the PMO in the first place, but also to those opposed to it. The point here is to resist the temptation to criticize or scold the organizational opposition, even in extreme anti-PM environs, and instead become a valuable servant, providing timely, accurate, and relevant management information to information-starved decision makers. Become an indispensable servant, and your journey towards a fully-developed career is far more likely to be successful. Or, Si dux esse vis, servus fias.[iii] [i] Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Si_vis_pacem%2C_para_bellum on January 26, 2026, at 19:11 MST. [ii] Ibid. [iii] Retrieved from https://lingvanex.com/translation/english-to-latin on January 29, 2026, at 19:26 MST. |
Posted on: January 29, 2026 09:36 PM
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The Dark Side Of Career Development
| I attained my PMP® certification soon after I graduated with my MBA, and I’m pretty sure that if that version of Michael could have read this blog, his response would have been to think the author to be overly cynical at best, and likely a flat-out curmudgeon. Alas, young Michael, that’s not the case – I know everything you know, and a whole bunch more besides, much of it delivered somewhat painfully. For those members of GTIM Nation with fewer career advancement scars than I have, I have a few things to pass along. First, the organization based on a pure meritocracy doesn’t exist. The closest may be United States Chess, where your standing equals your ranking, period. But even here players have been known to try to “psych out” their opponents, meaning that they will engage in allowed but bizarre tactics in-tournament to try and throw their opponents off of their games. When I was playing tournament chess back in high school, I once played against an opponent who was decked out in full ski clothing, including a parka and heavy mittens. He could barely move individual pieces. I beat him, handily. But back to the point of the creation of business models that, contrary to any of the Mission Statement or Company Values pablum, ultimately operate in ways that actually frustrate the most talented or insightful employees. Sure, demonstrated talent backed by hard work dramatically increases your chances of success, and those successes will normally lead to career advancement – but that’s not always the case. I had the misfortune to work for an organization chock-full of people who had become remarkably adept at distancing themselves from project failure, but glommed on to project successes like Great Lakes lampreys. So prevalent was this behavior that I had to wonder if it was being taught at some in-house seminar. When I, personally, was assigned the heavy lifting on a particularly difficult piece of scope, the “corporate” person assigned was nowhere to be found, and contributed absolutely nothing to its pursuit and completion. When it became clear that I was actually going to deliver on-time, on-budget, this fellow was suddenly in my office, hovering over me at each of the very last steps of the task, while still contributing nothing. Weeks later, during a review of the performing quarter, this person was being complimented for having “accomplished” this difficult task. My name wasn’t mentioned at all. And then we have the Office Politicos, those whose main goal is to advance their own personal interests, even if such advancement comes at the expense of the others on whatever team is unfortunate enough to have them in its ranks. These people’s favorite tactic is the ex parte communication, where only one side of an argument is presented to decision-makers. These conversations aren’t confined to gossip or calumny – in fact, they don’t have to be personal at all. But there’s a reason why ex parte conversations are not allowed in the field of Law, and that reason extends to discussions about business and management decisions, as well. Attempting to influence any decision that impacts a Project Team (or other organizational unit) without bringing in the basis for alternatives is not only disingenuous, it dramatically reduces the odds that the optimal – or even workable – strategy gets selected. The last scenario I want to address is the one where a new leader (or entire management team) is introduced into an existing PMO or other macro-organization. The brutal reality here is that loyalty, not merit or talent, is the coin of the realm when it comes to whose career is advanced, and whose is frustrated. I’m not without sympathy or understanding here: the new/transplanted leader/management team has, no doubt, experienced significant success using a set of specific management strategies and tactics, and are typically brimming with confidence that those strategies will work here, too, if only the extended organization embraces them. Unless the new manager/team is exceptionally advanced, anyone not a superior who even suggests that those new techniques aren’t necessarily optimal, or even workable, will be viewed as an obstruction to the newbies and their success narrative, an obstruction that must be neutralized (or even eliminated) immediately. It’s rather unfortunate that those who know this newbie effect to be true, and adjust their interactions accordingly, can be perceived as patronizing. True, some workers can be positively obsequious when dealing with higher-ups, and use this approach to get ahead. I hold these types of people to be very off-putting, if not insufferable, but that’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about those who are genuinely pursuing a goal of excellence, but must face the fact that they may be in a position where whatever flag is being raised by the execs must be saluted. It’s a difficult situation, but one that will likely present itself somewhere along a PM’s career path. Many other organizational behavior and performance pathologies exist that can disrupt the talented, hard-working PM’s career trajectory, unfortunately. But, as that career path unfolds, sticking with the pursuit of excellence approach, while more difficult, will pay dividends that the glommers, politicos, and organizational reality rejecters will never know. And I can live with that. |
Posted on: January 21, 2026 09:31 PM
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Is PM Really Just A Fad?
| The short answer to the question in the title is no, of course not; however, I believe that there is a real danger that the codex we embrace as advanced practitioners of Project Management might be susceptible to a similar erosion of its acceptance across the management sciences realm, and that we as a PM community ought to do something to prevent that from happening. For GTIM Nation regulars who may take umbrage at my title, along the lines of “If you knew the answer to be ‘no,’ why did you pose the question? You didn’t do it for cheap clicks, did you?” I have this to say: also, no. If I was going for cheap clicks, I would have entitled this blog entry “Read This Blog, Or A Tarantula Will Bite Your Face.” Now, on to the fad problem. The Financial Times had an article back in 2013, entitled “Where Others Failed: Top 10 Fads.”[i] Number 9 on this list is “Matrix Management.” I believe the author is in error here, as she mis-characterizes Matrix Management, and then goes on to disparage it. In organizations with considerable Project work, Matrix Management simply differentiates between the organization’s human resources (Asset Management), and its Projects’ demands (Project Management). It allows PMs to pursue delivering scope on-time, on-budget, while leaving issues about whether or not the engineers have sufficient certifications to the head of that pool of human resources. But author Lucy Kellaway[ii] didn’t check with me before Matrix Management made it to her list of “fads,” so there it is. To be sure, some of the entries on this list I hold to be spot-on. Her assessment of the number 3 entry, Six Sigma, is chillingly accurate. Kellaway’s assessment centers on the overly complex techniques used by the “green belts” and “black belts,” and deservedly so. And yet, in my opinion even here she kind of misses the point. Six Sigma, the Quality Managers’ sensational push into overarching corporate culture, does not apply to everybody. Recall my oft-cited axiom Quality, Affordability, Availability: pick any two. For those organizations that have staked out market share in the Affordable and Available niche, a sudden embrace of Quality is absolutely not indicated, even if the majority of highly-placed and massively influential executives and academics hold it to be the thing to do. And yet Six Sigma / Quality Management’s sudden rise and elongated decline provides an interesting model on how management fads experience sudden contagion, peak, plateau, and finally recede to the place approximately it had previously occupied in the management sciences realm. Motorola was its notable pioneer, in the late 1980s, followed closely by Honeywell, Dow Chemical, DuPont, and General Electric[iii]. About the same time Congress created a really cool national award dedicated to Quality, the Malcolm Baldridge Award. But as General Electric’s powerful influence on the universe of the Management Sciences began to wane in the early 2000s, so did Six Sigma’s popularity. Part of this loss of popularity was due, in my (and other’s) opinion, to an influx of consultants eager to push its precepts without a genuine understanding of its actual function, attempting to force its principles wayyyyy beyond products, and into processes and services where it really didn’t belong. Also, according to an article by Oliver Staley in QZ.com, It didn’t help that Six Sigma has no owner, accreditor, or even a commonly agreed upon body of knowledge.[iv] Meanwhile, Back In The Project Management World… Quality was one of the eight major sections in the original PMBOK Guide®, considered integral to the overall PM process, and consuming an eighth of the questions on the PMP® Certification exam (at least when I took it. My PMP® number is 1004, so it was a while back). Which all leads us back to the question, could the same rapid-adaption, peak/plateau, and loss of widespread acceptance cycle hit PM? I think we already have one of the two causal elements in place, where consultants and content providers pushing PM without a robust understanding of its proper place within overall business model development/maintenance are influencing the macro conversation. (This was, incidentally, the theme of my very first keynote speech, at a PM conference in Silicon Valley, that there are “charlatans” amongst us, and we should work to weed them out.) Typically, these can be readily identified by the way they make their assertions, in the “eat your peas”-style hectoring tone. But the other causal element behind Six Sigma’s demise is notably absent from PM. We do, indeed, have a universally-recognized accreditor, AND a body of knowledge, and have had for some time. Will the anchors of the PMBOK Guide® and PMP® accreditation be sufficient to prevent authors for business or management magazines of the future from declaring PM a fad? It should. And, if it doesn’t, then a tarantula should bite that author on the face. [i] Retrieved from https://www.ft.com/content/3c7f1e40-a03e-11e2-88b6-00144feabdc0 on January 7, 2026, 19:02 MST. [ii] Ibid. [iii] Retrieved from https://www.qualitygurus.com/history-of-six-sigma/ on January 8, 2026, 18:30 MST. [iv] Retrieved from https://qz.com/work/1635960/whatever-happened-to-six-sigma on January 8, 2026, 18:51 MST. |
Posted on: January 10, 2026 10:33 PM
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