My Professional Journey

Throughout my Project Management career and my preparation for the PMP® exam, my respect for lessons learnt kept on increasing incrementally. As soon as I passed the exam, I shared my lessons learnt from my journey towards passing the PMP® exam  with fellow aspirants on the LinkedIn group.

While I was updating my resume, as you do when you achieve a new skill or qualification , I looked at my role descriptions for the various projects and noted words like "Work with the project team, customer and management to implement product features in the XYZ software". I instantly realized that I was under-selling myself by not using the appropriate level of PMSpeak. I don't know if this term even exists but that's the best I could come up with to explain how a PM would describe what they do to gain more respect from others in interviews or professional circles. 

When I thought how PMBOK would describe what I do, it dawned on me that I was adding a lot more value on my projects than I was expressing in words.

I am delighted to say that my several months' worth  of hard work in not just preparing for the exam, but understanding the PMI way of running projects, has certainly taught me a more effective and a more efficient way of  presenting my work and packaging my skills.

I then presented the same information as :- 

"Work with the Project Management team and key business stakeholders to define and refine project and product scope, highlight risks, define project and product quality expectations and build the Software solution to customer satisfaction"

In the above sentence I have just made use of the objectives of the following processes from the PMBOK

1. Direct and Manage Project Work
2. Define Scope
3. Validate Scope
4. Manage Stakeholder Engagement
5. Identify risks
6. Perform Qualitative Risk Assessment
7. Plan Quality Management

I then looked at another  sentence in my position description that read "Signed SOW and contracts with external vendors to deliver solution".

Yes, we did agree on the SOW and sign a contract with the external vendors, But I did not do it alone and I had not expressed my function as an "integrator" and a "facilitator" in the above sentence. Nor did I establish that I successfully engaged and collaborated with other teams to achieve project objectives and how I held the vendor accountable for delivery. 

I them repackaged the same sentence as:- 

"Worked with the Procurement management and Legal Teams to establish and negotiate contracts and payment milestones with the vendor and continuously monitored vendor performance to deliver to the agreed Statement of Works"

I have thus, made a better use of the "Conduct Procurement" and "Control Procurement" processes in the above sentence and indicated how I have engaged successfully with other teams in the matrix organization and conducted performance assessments in order to complete my project deliverable. 

These valuable lessons learnt are no doubt, going to stand me in good stead for the rest of my working life and my project management career.