Project Completion Isn’t Project Success
What project management training doesn't teach and why it's costing you the recognition you've earned
Project management training teaches how to deliver. It doesn't teach why you’re delivering and this gap costs women promotions we've earned.
A senior executive recently described a long-term planning session her team had just come out of. One of her team members (certified and experienced in project management) spent their time reporting on operational details while the rest of the room was focused on the future of the business. She told me:
“The more I work on my own business savvy, the more I see that they don’t yet understand the overall business.”
She wasn’t being unkind. She was being accurate. And she’s not alone in noticing it.
The gap no one talks about
If you’re like most women, when a plum project lands in your hands you say yes, dive in, work heads down and strive for perfection. When it’s over, you bask in the accolades. A few months later, you wonder why a colleague got the promotion you thought you deserved.
Here’s what nobody told you: finishing the project isn’t the same as succeeding at it.
Early in my career, I was handed a high-visibility project - a system implementation, my first as a user project manager. By every measure I knew, it was a success. On time. On budget. I reveled in my success - the first system in the company to ever go up on time and on budget!
What I never once said - because it never once occurred to me - was why that system mattered for the business. The outcomes it drove. Why it was funded in the first place.
I could tell you exactly what I'd built. I couldn't have told you why anyone had paid for it.
I didn’t know why, because no one had taught me to ask.
That’s not a personal failure. It’s a systemic one that shows up everywhere. People spend hundreds of hours and hundreds of dollars on project management courses and certifications. Yet not one PMP I’ve ever asked could tell me how projects get approved and funded. It gets a mention — then dismissed with 'every company does it differently,' as if that's a reason not to teach it at all.
That is a stunning gap.
Here’s reality through the eyes of executives: no project gets approved without a business case. Someone, somewhere up the org chart, made a financial argument for why this initiative deserved resources over every other competing priority. In one organization I worked with, the approval threshold was eight times the cost of capital - within a defined timeframe. Eight times!
The PM leading that project had no idea. But the funding executives surely did.
What this means for you
A project isn’t successful because it came in on time and on budget.
A project is successful when the business outcome it was funded to achieve gets met or exceeded.
Those are two entirely different measures. And if you’re only able to talk about one of them, you’ll be seen as a capable executor - not as someone who understands the business.
That distinction is exactly what separates women who plateau from women who advance.
Below the paywall are 10 possible questions to ask when you’re handed a new project. Choose the ones that make sense.
