Guest Articles

And yet you manage projects all the time. You’re responsible for planning, co-ordinating and delegating tasks to your team. You keep things moving along from day to day and month to month. You hold everyone’s actions like a tightrope in your head and your team look to you, your Client relies on you, for the project to keep marching on.

If the above rings true then it is likely that you are an ‘Accidental Project Manager’.

Accidental Project Managers are the unsung heros of the project world. They take on the work because someone needs to and because they care. They want their projects to succeed. They want the team to succeed. They want to succeed themselves. And miraculously Accidental Project Managers naturally have a lot of the necessary skillset required to drive a project through to completion; they are organised, capable and often a natural leader.

The problem is that there is little to no support for this category of Project Manager. They tend to learn on the job, stumble a little reactively from one problem to the next and end up just about keeping their head above water. On the surface they look like they have it all together, but underneath they are struggling; with stress, overwhelm and imposter syndrome. They have no framework to help them succeed, no methodologies to help them automate and lack the structured approach of experienced Project Managers. They feel the weight of the project heavy on their shoulders and often have no one to share the burden with.

The world of Project Management is changing rapidly. The last decade has seen Project Management shift from a skillset to a recognised and regulated profession of its own right. The market has saturated with qualifications, degrees and charterships all offering an exciting professional career ahead. Research by Project Management Institute and the Association for Project Management shows that Project Management the fastest growing profession globally, with >25million new trained and competent Project Managers needed to fill demand by 2032 . 

Project Management is also one of the top five areas that business leaders want to prioritise . This means that even if you aren’t a Project Manager, it is likely that you are going to need some of the skillset of a Project Manager to succeed in business. The business case speaks for itself; APM research shows that projects delivered by trained and professionally competent Project Managers are significantly more likely to achieve predictable outcomes, on time and with reduced cost overruns .

What does this mean for Accidental Project Managers? It means that not only are more and more people becoming Project Managers, but more and more are becoming Accidental Project Managers too. As a result that means that there is a huge opportunity that the Project Management profession is currently missing; supporting Accidental Project Managers so that they can succeed better.

Project Management frameworks and change control processes are teachable. Proactive rather than reactive management is controllable. Motivational leadership skills that can navigate a project out of conflict are learnable. There is so much more that we can be doing to help Accidental Project Managers lead better so they can capitalise and improve on what they are already doing.

For too long Project Managers have been siloed. If you work in construction, you end up stuck in construction. If you work in tech, you end up stuck in tech. But there are so many opportunities for cross sector learning in the Project Management space. And so many opportunities for transferable skills that set future Project Managers up for greater career growth, impact and opportunities. Rather than asking ‘what experience do you have’, perhaps we ought to start asking ‘what transferable knowledge can you bring’. As that old adage goes…a project, is a project, is a project…! 

The future of Project Management isn’t just about attracting new people into the profession. It is about recognising Accidental Project Managers, acknowledging the amazing work that they are already doing and supplementing their skillset with targeted learning, mentoring and experience that can help them grow and fill in the gaps. The only way that we are going to meet the growing global demand for this exciting, fast past paced profession is if we think creatively and seek out those who would be excellent Project Managers, and currently accidentally are Project Managers, rather than waiting for newbies to come for us.

After all, if Accidental Project Managers are holding our projects together now, imagine what they could do if they had the training and support to really exceed. And imagine the impact that would have on our projects, and society more widely.

Author: Rachael Keeble, Founder at BuiltWell Project Management