When I was just starting out in my career, I didn’t realize how much organizations were a lot like me, just trying to find their way, especially in areas like project management and organizational change initiatives. You can get ahead of business, sooner than I did, if you understand where your career (and business in general) is going, sooner than I did.

Now I know that we are all constantly learning and figuring things out, but I can use my experiences with past decisions and share my stories to help inform my future self, and individuals, teams, and organizations dealing with this ongoing evolving subject material of the change project management field of study.

I went through and highlighted all the main points in my copy of “Project Management for the Unofficial Project Manager” that really jive with my own experience performing Project Management in unorthodox, informal, “unofficial” environments and/or capacities.

This book is about how to get things done and done as well as possible in those circumstances…

Here is my takeaway #2 from one of the most useful/practical books in my field, “Project Management for the Unofficial Project Manager”:

2) “Now, as we research productivity in the twenty-first-century workplace, we realize that the methods and systems that “official” project managers use can fill an enormous skills gap for what has become the “unofficial” project management workforce–basically the vast majority of knowledge workers.”

(Note: This comes from the Introduction of the book.)

Ever consider yourself a knowledge worker? You have subject expertise in whatever area of work you specialize in. People resources and your knowledge are the best asset an organization has. It’s only useful if used correctly by generalist managers, however, to achieve successful knowledge management on its initiatives and projects!

Organizations advance the work and improve best practices based on lesson’s learned from project to project. Only problem is most companies rely on subject experts to perform improvement projects to take their positions, their teams, and their organizations to the next level without them having any formal training or organizational understanding of project management and how to support it. It’s best when there is a full-time project manager separate from the full-time subject area experts assigned to a project for optimal results, but with understaffed teams and the trend for Lean Operations organizations may take the risk (of stretching you too thin and dealing with more likely rework) and you may be called upon to wear both hats.

That’s why a basic understanding of professional project management is essential for you (and the organization you work for) to advance your career, your functional areas, and your organizations to the next level when given the opportunity to do so.

In the Information Age, we are all knowledge workers. We learn, adapt, and grow from the knowledge we share with one another. Whatever your subject expertise that you learned in college, technical school, growing up, or in your work experience, is your knowledge area, but that’s not all. You will need to keep learning, experiencing, and expanding on your understanding of where your growing knowledge fits into the grand scheme of things, and how to connect it together with the knowledge of other experts in their respective areas. In other words, whether or not you have gained learning in, or have a background in Project Management, at some point, and probably many times over, you will be called on to manage projects, or in the least work on many project teams.

If you follow professional project management best practices you have the best chance of success. (Statistics show that 70% of projects fail, but 83% of successful projects are led by Project Management Professionals (PMPs).)

Story time: I joined a company when a major departmental project, directly related to my position, was already underway. The team had made a great decision to reconstruct a product database and start fresh. They also already named a Project Manager, the person who scoped out the need and had great intuition to suggest the team migrate the database to a clean environment. This Engineer was appointed as Team Lead to manage my data upload, entry, and construction efforts to bring the database up to par. That person was well-suited for that Lead role (as no one else had much knowledge of the intricacies of the database, or time, and how best to set it up for our current needs) but was not well-versed in project management best practices.

I had extensive subject expertise working with database information at BYU, a consistently top 5 academic library as the Cataloging Operations Manager for 9 years. But for the sake of comparison, at the library, our database was not a PLM and it was already customized for our needs and operational. We also had 70+ personnel (half subject experts and half students) in our Cataloging Department at any given moment taking on various aspects and variabilities of a much larger database. Operations practically ran itself. I was certified as a Project Management Professional (PMP) and as such had many qualifiable hours enacting other projects (some successful, some not) for other subject areas, but I lacked a lot of technical knowledge, and company and industry knowledge that presented a big picture of the new database project needs that lie ahead.

To make a long story short, until I learned the ins and outs of the database, I could not discern what data requirements were most important, nor deliver successful data. And until my colleagues were brought up to speed on proper project management methods and systems to further our cause, we could not deliver a successful project. We mismanaged that project in every way possible and the scope creep was outpacing the resources devoted to it. A couple years into the project, I was appointed Project Manager, which allowed me enough authority to make needed course altering adjustments. Once we started over with an actual agreed upon project charter, milestones, and success criteria, along with sound principles of project management to guide us along the path, we successfully made the new database operational within 1 year (Note: it had been on pace to finish in 6-8 years total).