I received an email from a past client this morning asking for some help “selling project management” within his organization. From my own experience I know how difficult communicating the value of project management can be.

I remember early in my career managing an IT project. At the beginning of the initiative my team and I carefully identified stakeholders and the scope of work and then planned the implementation. There were a few hiccups along the way, but the time we took at the start paid off and the project ran pretty smoothly.

Contrast this with a very similar project running at the time.  This project’s team had dived into the implementation with minimum planning. Problem after problem surfaced. They had to work long hours and weekends to put out the many “fires” that occurred. Their project delivered several months late.

Later on I discovered that a senior director had noticed the weekends and long nights that the “firefighting” team had worked. In the next company meeting he made special mention of the time they’d put in. Our team, who’d delivered the project on time, on budget to a happy client who went on to order more of our services, got no mention!

It was a good early lesson for me. I realised that good project management is like invisible glue that pulls a project together. The time that a project manager takes liasing between all the key people, cajoling and negotiating with them to agree a realistic scope and timescales, ensuring they take on the correct roles and do the right work can be easily forgotten.

I realised that one very important role for a project manager is project management publicity. These days I encourage project managers to regularly communicate to key people the importance of their work. For example a recent client managed to get agreement about the scope of a large change programme for a multi-national company. After months of disagreement, he’d got all the key people into a room, spent a long day facilitating a hard negotiation and came out with a realistic agreement. I made sure he communicated his role in this work to his own senior managers and how this meant a large order for an implementation initiative for his own company.

Make sure – for your own good – people realise all the work that you have done as a project manager, how difficult it was and its importance.