Promote yourself

You are a highly competent, technically excellent project manager who deliv­

ers results time after time, so why are your efforts being ignored? Unfortu­

nately, it is often not enough to do a good job. You also have to make sure you are seen by project sponsors to be doing a good job. And not only are project sponsors frequently uninterested in your activities – they also have a very different idea from you as to what constitutes a job well done.

P R O M O T I N G A P R O T É G É

Alison Batten, a programme manager in the insurance sector, was mentoring a junior project manager who was hoping for a promotion. ‘Together, we sat down and looked at the projects she was running. One was for a highly influential sponsor, whom I knew well. I knew he’d prefer to receive concise but detailed reports, and I found out that at the time he wasn’t receiving any project information outside the monthly steering group reports. I suggested she sent him a summary of her more regular updates. She didn’t need to change how she was managing the project – just how he thought she was.’

The junior project manager changed the way she communicated with the sponsor and started to see some results in how she was perceived. ‘Don’t underestimate the power of having a senior sponsor on side,’ Batten says.

‘You’re far more likely to be requested to work on their pet projects and your availability to do so is likely to be discussed at a senior level.’

At the same time, Batten suggested that her protégé created a higher pro­

file for herself. When Batten was on holiday, she left the running of the pro­

gramme in the project manager’s hands, including chairing a programme meeting with several senior members of staff. The project manager found that the more people who knew her and appreciated her skills, the easier it was to put forward the case for a promotion, which she got a few months later.

‘I used a similar method myself,’ says Batten, ‘in order to secure my last job move. Ensuring the key people know what you are capable of is essential to getting the recognition you deserve.’

Lynn Crawford, a Sydney-based researcher, studied the gap between how good project managers were at doing their job and how good their supervisors thought they were.⁸⁴ She tested over 200 project managers against both their knowledge of techniques and their practical ability to do the job, using the Australian National Competency Standards for project management.

Then she asked their supervisors to rate them on four criteria: their value to their clients and to their organization, the ability to motivate others and their ability to work with colleagues to deliver a project. The results were

Project Management in the Real World

surprising. There was no statistical correlation between doing well on the tests and receiving a good supervisor score. Crawford concluded that ‘the knowledge and practices valued by project management practitioners, and embodied in their professional standards, are not the same as the knowledge and practices valued by senior managers’. When she looked deeper into the results, she found that if project managers wanted to be perceived as excellent at work by their supervisors, then they should concentrate on:

• working on projects with a high level of ambiguity in either scope or methodology;

• working on projects that differ greatly from each other;

• developing an excellent knowledge of cost, time, procurement and HR management, and using these skills to control their projects;

• not becoming too involved with general management activities, in order to avoid being seen as interfering.

In an organization where projects are allocated to you without the oppor­

tunity to choose or express a preference for your work, the first two recom­

mendations may be difficult to achieve. Concentrate on trying to influence those people that make the decisions about the projects on which you work.

If they see you starting to operate at a more senior level, then there is more chance of them giving you the challenging projects you need, which will in turn raise your profile elsewhere in the organization.

Following Crawford’s last two recommendations will improve your skills and how others perceive you, but you will still need to attract the attention of senior managers in order for them to form a perception of your abilities.

These senior managers may not be involved directly in your work and will, therefore, pay less attention to your successes.

Try to raise your profile subtly with a few of these ideas:

• Circulate useful articles to your project management colleagues or occasionally mention titbits of knowledge you have acquired: ‘When I was at the marketing meeting this week, Karen told me she was leaving – I thought you might like to know, as it could affect the mailing you are planning.’ Subscribe to magazines relevant to project management or your industry, many of which are free to qualifying applicants. Display them prominently on your desk so your team mates can see you are the sort of person who keeps your knowledge up to date. Starting to raise your profile in your team will have a knock-on effect in other departments, as your colleagues start to mention your name for the right reasons.

• Make sure people know of your achievements. Find opportunities to mention your successes, but remember no one likes a braggart. Slip your self-publicity statement in around another message or story: ‘I was out at the weekend with a friend who told me her company has just lost five weeks of client records when their database crashed. It’s

Promote yourself

a good thing I made sure we’ve got proper backups on the project I’m working on – at least that can’t happen to the sales database here.’

•

ential people. Either approach it as a work shadowing opportunity or create a reason why it might be relevant to your project.

• Never turn down an opportunity for internal networking – staff brief­

ings, lunches, management question-and-answer sessions (have an intelligent question to ask).

• Be prepared for your encounters. Plan a 30-second (interesting) sum­

mary of your current activity so if you are asked what you’re working on, you sound intelligent and articulate. You can use this kind of ‘elev­

ator’ speech at conferences too.

• People like to think they form their own opinions, but in reality they are easily influenced by the opinions of others. If other people think highly of you, let it be known: ‘The editor of XYZ Journal liked the article on risk management I submitted and is going to publish it next month.’ It doesn’t have to be the opinions of high-flyers or even named individuals either: ‘I was chosen to do the analysis on the Project Lambda business case.’ But say it in a positive tone: self-deprecation can make a compliment sound like you were picked because everyone else was working on more exciting and important projects.

• Become indispensable to your programme manager. Stay in the loop about what is happening at programme level and then offer to take the reins when they are away. Do a good job, but hand them back gracefully, with an excellent briefing of what happened. Programme managers will have more confidence in you if you do not become precious about your time in their chair.

• Don’t be too modest. Project sponsors want to know that everything is under control, but if you sort out every issue and just reassure them that things are on track, they will just see the smooth progress and not your gargantuan efforts to stay on schedule. In your meetings, explain your difficulty but still add the assurance that you have fixed it: ‘We had an issue with our new database servers; there was no space to connect them up in the warehouse. It was a bit frantic, but I finally managed to find the space by getting the team to reorganize what was already in there. They got it all connected in time for the sales team to start testing the new system.’ No longer will your hard work be transparent.

• Never talk yourself down, even outside of work. Never use the phrase

‘It’s not that interesting.’ Someone found your project interesting or they wouldn’t have asked you to do it. Even if it is too complicated to explain in detail, you should always remain positive and upbeat about what you do.

Ask to tag along with someone who is attending a meeting with influ­

Project Management in the Real World

You don’t actually have to be the best-performing project manager in your company to do a good job of promoting yourself. Take the opportunities that are offered, create your own opportunities and build on your self-promotion skills. The trick is making sure that the people who matter think that you are doing a good job, regardless of how confident you feel in your own ability.

G O L D E N R U L E S

In order to become recognized for your project-management skills, make sure you, first, give your senior stakeholders what they want and, second, work on your profile within your organ­

ization.