From Outside the PM Lines - Why PM?

I get asked lots of questions from time to time from individuals - both on a personal level and a professional level - who aren't project managers. I'm guessing we all do, so I'm hoping that this series of articles will generate some discussions. I want to address some of the topics that come up from these questions. They may be meant more for the non-PM looking to become a PM...there are a lot of those individuals out there in the business and IT world and probably many other sectors...it's just that those are the ones I deal with the most.

For this article, I want to address the "Why project management?" concept.

For me it's easy. I was working in a government contracting world and a large Department of Education contract my company was bidding on needed a project manager to propose as a key resource in the proposal. I had been a developer for a while, but I was ready for a change and I had discussed that with my manager and other leaders in the organisation. The timing was perfect. I had started taking on more administrative-type assignments that would build PM-type skills like estimating, large-scale budget management, resource management, and change control, so the groundwork was being laid for the career change. We won that contract, I took on the proposed role in the new contract upon award, and the rest is history.

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