Good Project Managers Teach Project Management to Coworkers

This blog was inspired by this post on Reddit, and is an expansion on the comment I wrote in response.

So you’re a project manager. Do you also think of yourself as an educator?

In my nearly 8 years as a project manager, I’ve had mounting experiences that show me I will be a more effective project manager if I teach teams and stakeholders around me about project management. Everything will go more smoothly if I embrace this as part of my role.

Experience #1

For example, at the 2023 PMI Global Summit, I attended a session led by Mike Griffiths entitled, "Feeling Conflicted? Implementing Agile Practices in an Un-Agile Organization.” My goal in attending this session was to wrap my head around why my previous attempts to implement agile in pockets of my company hadn’t really taken off. While many factors can impact the success of an agile deployment, I concluded my biggest gap was not taking enough time to explain the concepts behind the new practices I’d proposed or the specific value I saw in those practices for the project or team at hand.

My teams needed understanding before they could buy in, and they needed buy-in before they would go out of their way to try a new approach with any consistency. I’m sure I’d explained things a bit, but it wasn’t enough. I didn’t see myself as an educator in those moments.

Experience #2

For a few months, I’ve been on a journey to have a one-on-one meeting with every person at my company who uses our project management software and project processes, with the goal of meeting with each of our 80+ users once a year. In each meeting, I use the time to learn what is and isn’t working for that individual, and I teach them the next thing about our software or processes they seem ready to learn.

Not only does each user get immediate value that’s customized to them, but the meetings give me the opportunity to understand trends of what is and isn’t working across my company so that I can make good decisions about process changes or improvements for everybody. I’ve already learned about a software feature that’s much more popular than I realized, and I sent a communication to all our users to educate them about this feature and allow them to benefit.

Experience #3

While the project management department supports at least two thirds of the projects at my company, there are still pockets of projects supported by non-project managers.

Rather than either ignoring these projects, or trying to force them into the hands of my department, I’ve been inspired by two presentations at the 2023 PMI Global Summit—courtesy of Erica Jorde, Maia Hyary, and Lauren Walter—to begin a quarterly educational support group for all of these non-project-managers who sometimes slip into a project management role. The focus will be on teaching best practices that make life easier for these individuals, while providing consistency for those who do work on their projects. Education is an empowering, human-centered way to add value to everyone in this scenario.

It’s worth the time.

Just as I argue that giving everybody the big picture of a project at the beginning through a kickoff meeting provides tremendous value to the project—essentially, that shared understanding of context reduces errors—I likewise observe that teaching everybody involved in your projects about the processes being used and the reasons behind them has a similar effect. Motivation and buy-in trend up. Adoption trends up. Miscommunication trends down. If you take time to educate on the front end, you spend less time correcting on the back end.

I think I hesitated for a long time to ask people to stop their other work and listen to me teach them something, because everyone is busy and I didn’t want to interrupt them longer than necessary.

Time and experience have taught me that these interruptions are worth it.

Experiment with the format.

Educating your coworkers about project management can take many forms, and you will have better instincts than me about what will work for your teams and stakeholders.

At my organization, I find people are less willing to engage in voluntary group education settings like open office hours or lunch-and-learns, so I made the decision to give every person custom one-on-one education that only spends time on concerns relevant to that person. Distributing emails, videos, or online courses might work for you—I’ve tried these in the past, and I may come back to them once I understand trends across my company and develop instincts on what education topics will resonate with large numbers of my coworkers.

The key is asking yourself what amount and form of education will give people the understanding and context they need to see the value in project processes and use them well.

It will be a journey to figure out how to achieve this in your setting, but if you begin the journey, both your teams and your project leadership will be stronger for it.