Tough Projects, Tougher Project Managers: Why You're Needed

I mentor people who are new to project management, and one of the common realisations I witness is how quickly they realise that this stuff is hard. In fact, when I talk to seasoned practitioners, it’s not uncommon to hear them wish for an easy project once in a while.

But here’s the thing—there aren’t any.

If it was easy, it wouldn’t need to be a project

Things that are easy don’t need a skilled Project Manager to deliver them. I recall a time when I heard the argument in reverse. I was on a project where there was serious discussion about whether it even needed to be a project or whether the teams could self-organise to deliver it. The CTO at the time said, “If this was something they could self-organise to deliver, wouldn’t they have done it already?”

So, you’re not going to get an easy project. Easy projects don’t need to be projects; they become tasks that the teams can deliver as part of their ‘business as usual’ cadence.

As a Project Manager, you’re only going to get the challenges that teams are not able to solve on their own.

If it was easy, it wouldn’t need you

As a Project Manager, you have an incredible array of skills and experiences that would be wasted on an easy project.

You have the ability to help people collaborate when they’re not used to working together. You can influence senior stakeholders in an organisation. You can lead a team you’ve only just met, who often have little interest in working on this new thing they’ve been given. You can hold a vision of what the future could look like and then bring that vision to life. You can run a workshop at the drop of a hat. You can predict what might go wrong, and then actually stop some of those things from happening. You can switch between tasks like a pro, track financials, and negotiate for decisions or resources that are needed—among a thousand other things I don’t have the space to write (and you don’t have the patience to read!).

With a skill set like that, if I were running the organisation, I wouldn’t assign you to an easy project. That would be a waste of your talents.

Embrace the hard

If you spend your life on projects, you’re going to spend your life tackling hard challenges. If that’s uncomfortable for you, then maybe it’s time to consider a different career.

I’ve learnt to embrace the hard. The toughest challenges are what excite me. I learn the most and grow the most—both personally and professionally—when the going gets tough. I get to keep honing my skills when the challenges are hard. I take satisfaction in knowing that I’m working on something that really isn’t easy, that might seem like a black art to those on the outside, and simply wouldn’t get done if I weren’t there. To me, that’s motivation and reward all rolled into one.

Of course projects are hard. That’s why you’re there.