Improving the Profile of Project Management

There are a lot of really good suggestions in this thread. One that maybe I missed or is not present is the value of quick wins. In my experience, bringing tools and methods that work to deliver a project on time speaks loudly at the beginning of the "sell-in" process. Taking a team through a work breakdown structure event, facilitating the building of a schedule that they believe in, running good orderly meetings with meeting minutes, exposing the organization to a critical path, working with the team cross-functionally to get to root-cause of an issue, excellent communications. While these all seem simple to those of us in the trade, these could be revolutionary to organizations that are living in the "Wild-Wild-West" without a PMO or solid Project Management. Executing projects on time is a foreign concept to them. If you can do this in relative short order, it's a certain recipe for sell-in success.

I have used this approach very successfully across 3 major industries in multiple companies.

Darlene,

you received great advise so far.
Let me add another perspective:

PM is a wide field, with a focus on making stuff happen. Every organisation has different issues regarding making stuff happen and you probably can find out top 3 issues of your organisation. Solving or mitigating these top 3 will add tremendous value and has a visible impact.

So - once you defined the 3 issues in sufficient detail - you can select from the wide field those few concepts that solve them.

Be aware that once you solved them, you need to find the next top 3 or you risk of becoming obsolete.

The role of the PM is a different story. You might have top performers (those you get stuff done today) and model the role after them, helping them even to remove waste from their task list. I found it more difficult to define the PM role without support of the current top performers and mostly impossible to define a role that nobody yet occupies, at least partly.

Thomas