By Loay Dirar
These days, there is a growing discussion about the business side of project management and how it supports all the technical and functional areas within all kind of businesses.
But what does that actually mean to us? For most of the companies in Sudan and the Middle East, the answer dates all the way back to the mid-1980s. Before that time, all the companies and employees were organized in a functional-based structures and thought that the world revolved around technology, engineering and medicine. In the late-1990s the world started to revolve around things like commerce, economics, finance and trade—the world of business.
So how did they shit their careers? Nowadays If you talk to any Project Managers about their career to date and how they managed to get where they are today you’ll soon discover that their path to project manager was a mixture of accidental—being in the right place at the right time (or wrong place at the wrong time if you’re talking to a disgruntled PM!) and choosing a particular role backed up with training / development.
Many Project Managers have natural ability to organize and lead; they are often good at getting things done and therefore “drift” towards a recognized PM role.
As such not many project managers actually engineered their first step into project management. So that makes your career change a little difficult – here’s our advice on how to “accidentally” find yourself in a project management role:
- Discover where recognised projects are undertaken in your company and look to build links with those departments through networking with staff taking an interest in their activities and how they impact the role you have.
- Within your current role volunteer to take on additional work to lead or work with in activities that deliver a change and handle it as a project.
- Think about your current role – are you already carrying out some elements of your role in a project management fashion? If so, could you perform this role in a more structured and true project management way? Your line manager would be very interested to see how the department could perform better at its projects – regardless of how “informal” these projects are today – by better management. Talk to your manager about the possibilities of putting this into practice – but make sure you do your homework first.
- Start to talk in terms of delivery, cost, and resources and time to get things done – think project.
- Start to create/tailor make your own templates and reports and embed them gradually inside your company’s files.