Scaling Your Project Management Career

Project managers ascend the career ladder based on accumulated experience-derived wisdom and managing progressively larger and more complicated efforts. A typical trajectory involves moving from managing projects to programs, portfolios, and project management organizations. Success at one level is not a guarantee of success at the next. It is the classic case of “what got you here will not get you there.”

Position descriptions identify the formal expectations and required technical skills. Progression involves demonstrating increased responsibility, independent decision-making, and managing efforts of greater complexity. However, these formal definitions do not adequately describe how project managers advance their careers. This article describes the path and skills required to scale and grow a career.

Individual Contributor to Project Manager

Project managers often come from other fields or positions. Engineers, accountants, software developers, and other subject matter experts may work on a project and decide to pursue project management as their career.

The shift from individual contributor to project manager may be subtle. Individual contributors' career progression is based on personal performance and domain knowledge. Someone’s technical competency and the ability to get things done often lead to these first project management opportunities.

Early-stage project managers focus on acquiring foundational, “hard” technical skills, such as:

Building a project schedule and tracking progress;
Managing issues, action items, and risks; and
Effectively articulating and communicating project status.

Mature project organizations have guidelines and standard practices that help develop these critical skills. However, many project managers are self-taught and learn through trial and error.

Managing Complex Projects

Project managers ascend the professional ladder by moving to progressively larger and more complicated projects. Team size increases. Problems and solutions are more complex. Effective stakeholder management and communications become more critical. The impact of success or failure increases, as does senior management visibility.

The project managers need to relinquish their subject matter expert role and leverage their team’s knowledge and experience. This requires developing the facilitation and conflict management skills to bring out the best in the team. These shifting roles recognize that managing a complex effort and developing a solution is nearly impossible.

Advanced proficiency in technical project management skills is a prerequisite. Mastery of industry-standard tools and demonstrating execution discipline are expected. Post-mortems of failed projects often uncover a breakdown in these basic practices. Risks, issues, and action items are not documented and actively managed. Project schedules are not constructed correctly. Optimism prevails despite clear warning signs.

As projects grow, “soft” skills become increasingly important. Regularly assessing, engaging, and monitoring stakeholders is crucial for building and maintaining a supportive guiding coalition. Situational awareness, conflict management, negotiation, and influencing skills are critical when working with executives and external stakeholders. Creating a collaborative and low-stress environment for the project team requires high emotional intelligence.

Developing humility is beneficial. Self-promotion can be an effective career-building tool for an individual contributor. However, as projects get larger, success and glory belong to the team. The project manager must regularly and publicly recognize team members’ contributions.

Managing Programs

Programs are a collection of projects and operations managed together to achieve a common, coordinated outcome. The skills developed from leading large, complex projects are foundational to program management. However, scaling from projects to programs requires a focus shift.

Program managers must concentrate on the “big picture,” reduce the “signal-to-noise ratio,” and “see the forest from the trees.” To avoid being mired in extraneous project details, they must master the art of delegation. The program manager must empower and delegate the execution of individual projects to the project managers and shift their attention to focusing on overall program success.

Program management highlights cross-project dependencies, connection points, communications, governance, and oversight. Schedule status and reporting should focus on program milestones and handoffs. Risks, issues, and change management address program-level impacts.

Program stakeholders are often higher in the organization, so sharpening stakeholder management and communication skills is critical. Understanding internal politics, power dynamics, and directions of influence allows the program manager to leverage relationships. The ability to clearly and effectively communicate and address stakeholder needs is invaluable.

Creating the program structure, governance, oversight, and management plan is highly beneficial. Small projects require less structure and formality. Coordinating the work of many teams and organizations requires consistency and standardization. Teams can collaborate more effectively using a common language and taxonomy. Reporting and oversight are easier.

One program was hampered because the 50 project teams used 20 different defect-tracking systems. Reporting software quality requires a manual process.

Managing Portfolios

Portfolio management enables the enterprise to realize its strategic vision. The portfolio manager works with senior management, sponsors, and project and program managers to:

Prioritize and select projects and programs aligned with the organization’s strategic objectives;
Provide portfolio-level oversight, governance, and reporting; and
Ensure benefits realization.

The portfolio manager’s primary focus is optimizing enterprise outcomes. The first step is articulating the organization’s vision, goals, and measures of success. Then, project and program business cases can be evaluated against these criteria, and decisions can be made. Realizing the vision may involve balancing risk vs. reward, betting on emerging technologies and products while disinvesting in others, or supporting safety and soundness over growth.

Strategic alignment is the watchword of portfolio management. Project and program managers focus on execution and delivery, while portfolio managers establish governance and oversight structures that create transparency and accountability. Guidelines, practices, and tools build this framework and set expected behaviors.

“Soft” skills are paramount. The ability to negotiate and influence is vital to success. Portfolio managers navigate the competing interests of powerful stakeholders. Executives often advocate for their parochial interests. Project and program managers clamor for resources for their efforts. Customers, users, or impacted constituencies can upend even the best-laid plan. The portfolio manager must balance all these needs, do what is best for the organization, and leave everyone “satisfied.”

Managing Project Organizations

Managing effective project execution organizations requires embracing Drucker’s definition of leadership. The leader must ensure the organization is “doing the right things.” To scale, the leader must trust and believe their project managers are “doing things right.” Therefore, their role shifts from directive to facilitative. They should develop trusting relationships with their project managers and coach them through challenges to proactively avert problems.

Leaders of project execution organizations need to develop infrastructure that enables success, including:

Creating assets such as guidelines, templates, and tools that promote consistent and repeatable processes;
Investing in human capital through formal and informal training;
Removing organizational obstacles and blockers that inhibit effective and efficient processes; and
Having a strategic view of the industry, profession, and where their organization needs to go.

Leaders of project management organizations strive to build the capabilities to manage and deliver projects and programs more consistently and effectively. Templates, tools, and practices provide the base. However, creating practices to share wisdom and experience differentiates high-performing organizations.

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