Businesses have big projects, small projects, and every size of project in between. Projects advance business and professionals. The biggest project you will work on in your career is yourself.

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 #3 from one of the most useful practical books in my field, “Project Management for the Unofficial Project Manager”:

3) “One of FranklinCovey’s clients, a director in his company’s Project Management Office (PMO), has this to say…The ‘Big P’ projects have plenty of oversight and corrective action when needed. The greater challenge is the everyday, ‘Small P’ projects.”

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

Story time: In one of the first organizations in my career, we paid a good amount of money for a program from the FranklinCovey team of experts to have them come in and teach us and organize our efforts to work toward Goals aligned with a new shared company-wide Vision and Mission. This is where I officially became a project manager to lead our department to accomplish 3 annual initiatives. I later became a Project Management Professional (PMP) and discovered the FranklynCovey program was just a small part of the field of project management. Now I have discovered that project management is just a small part of doing business. But the beauty of it is it is just that easy to get started.

You can learn project management on the job, doing projects. Businesses need more project managers who are willing to take on projects and learn best practices as they go. It’s not hardly taught in college even still today after all. And yet, Project Management is the best way I know to progress business, but most mentors and programs do not teach it in that way either.

People, there is a great need in your offices for everyday professionals to become project manager ambassadors to advance business. Most companies manage projects, but that does not mean they professionally project manage, especially on the 100s of mini projects that have to be completed 24/7. These things add up. They may require more time and energy when all told than the big projects. But there’s “more to do than could ever be done” in the time you have to do them, to steal a line from the “Lion King”.

If your company knows how to manage the big projects, and that’s a big “if”, they still don’t have time to teach you how to manage the little projects, but they could sure use you learning how to take those on. See something you can help with and then frame the work and pitch how you would project manage it. Make sure you have sign-off on strategically aligned projects, even mini-projects. Here are the 3 possible outcomes to pitching projects:

1. If it is important enough you will likely be given the opportunity to do the work and you will gain valuable experience.

2. If something else is more important, then they might suggest another project you can work on. Note: It should eventually lead to doing projects you want to do that are more fulfilling for you and for the company.

3. If you do well, you will get more projects to lead and things that were not getting done will start getting done around your company.

Usually cross-functional work has a lot of improvement project possibilities, because work between people on disparate teams can have a lot of issues until workflows and standards are well-established, well-known, and well-practiced. There are tons of opportunities to fix challenges with “broken” processes where steps are being missed and handoffs of information between assignments are being dropped. No one person can “own” this, it takes a team, specifically a project team when the work between hands is unique.

Tip: Negotiate for projects that are cross-functional and/or needs other subject experts (people resources), so that you can lead work that has a team. Working on a project all by your lonesome doesn’t give you a lot of good project management experience and doesn’t serve the projects and organization in the best way forward.