On Certifications and Effective Project Management

On Certifications and Effective Project Management

Why I found it more productive to not be a Project Management Professional (PMP)

Mike Stein

Nov 03, 2026

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I’ve always held certifications and credentials with a strange duality of respect and skepticism.

I’m fundamentally interested in learning and self-improvement

. Building knowledge through study is motivating for me. Yet I have held, increasingly over time, a cynicism and paranoia towards whether or not the process of earning a certification actually includes learning, improving, and demonstrating relevant skills. When a credential takes a significant investment of the

finite time

of your career, time that could have been spent earning compounding returns on the development of skills in the field, it can be a lot more productive to

not

get it.

Here’s

how I navigated two certification-related crossroads in my career

and where I think the operational

approach of the credentialed class of Project Managers doesn’t meet the needs of fast-moving teams in the real world

.

Why I’m not a PhD

I enrolled in a PhD program right after college, mostly out of my motivation for continued learning and self-improvement. I enjoyed the coursework and teaching responsibilities of the first few years of the program, but by the end, when the vast majority of my time was going into my thesis, once learning took a backseat to research, the academic world lost its luster.

So I decided to leave before finishing my PhD, a decision which proved shocking and unthinkable to everyone else in my program.

To me, it was simple.

I now knew I had no direct career need for the signal that those three letters after my name would give, and I didn’t believe I’d become a stronger or smarter person from enduring the remainder of the dissertation process.

The fact that it was so culturally unusual ended up making

being a PhD dropout a useful “anti-signal”;

this made me a

more

attractive job candidate to teams of critical thinkers driving high-velocity practical impact than completing my PhD would have, and those were the teams I wanted to join.

Why I’m not a PMP

Over a decade later, as I assessed the next phase of my career during my

sabbatical

, I struggled with making my diverse array of leadership experiences fit into a single traditional job title. “Project Manager” was one of the more accurate fits among normal roles, so I briefly considered studying for and pursuing a Project Manager Professional (PMP) certification.

I approached this particular credential with more skepticism than respect. Among the clients I had worked closely with as a Forward Deployed Engineer, career project managers at large organizations tended to focus too much of their project planning on homogenous, overly rigid execution to avoid the risk of looking stupid –

usually at the expense of increasing the risk of more fatal but quieter failures around the velocity and speed of delivery

.

The

curriculum of the PMP exam

has its heart in the right place but is at least a little too thick on the details of its one-size-fits-all approach. While most of the Tasks are reasonable, the bullets evoke failures I had seen from client Project Managers I interfaced with rather than how I managed successful projects for my teams.

So I decided against pursuing a PMP and resigned myself to continued life with no acronyms in my email signature.

None of the most interesting roles I considerefd applying to ended up requiring it, and, much like my PhD, I realized that the anti-signal on my resume of being a field-proven project manager

without

a PMP conveyed meaningful information;

I wanted to work with teams that would value my existing practical experience over that of any certification.

Outperforming the PMP approach

My approach to effectively managing projects was built through time in the trenches and differs from the approaches of both academia and the Project Management Professional in several ways:

Project management isn’t just one person’s job

. I’m writing this newsletter because I believe that every member of an optimized team plays a role in managing its projects, not just a Project Manager. The whole team must see matters of streamlining team efficiency (e.g.

making the meetings they’re in not suck

) as

also their

responsibility.

Prioritization is more relentlessly volatile than most project management frameworks anticipate or allow.

Rigid project management processes tend to underestimate both the probability and the magnitude of shifts in priorities during the course of the project. Leave space and build structures for unforeseen important tasks and pivots with approaches such as

effective knowledge capture

,

recovery antisurges after big delivery milestones

, and

time blocking

. These only really work if each individual person does it, not as something driven by a centralized Project Manager.

Dependencies are hard to predict in advance and hard to see from the sidelines.

Soft and implicit dependencies often aren’t on the Gantt chart drawn up at the start of the project, but they can be just as important as the foreseeable ones. The best way to get better at seeing these is to have responsibilities on the frontlines of a project beyond just project management.

Denominators are hard.

To know what your team actually can accomplish in its finite time each week, you need to account for how people pivot to

emergent important and urgent tasks

, spend time on

necessary administrative and logistical tasks in their time budget

, and lose a few percentage points to being sick,

slightly sick

, or

out of office

. So a Project Manager needs to invest time in learning, not dictating, how each team member works in their far fewer than 40 hours left in the week for the project.

The fastest possible deadline

isn’t always the right one

. Easy to see when designing a bottom-up, people-first approach to team productivity, but easy to miss with a top-down, structure-first approach.

Put it into practice

If you’re not the Project Manager on your team,

think of how you can leverage the above

to positively impact the management of your project. You all lose when your project isn’t running optimally.

When considering certifications and credentials in your career,

think deeper about what they signal on your resume

. If your values and interests aren’t fully aligned with those of a certification, do you really want to work for an employer that strictly requires it?

Don’t outsource your judgment and prioritization

to a Project Manager or to a project plan. Revisit prior assumptions and constantly identify where the goals and risks are shifting. If you work in an organization where you are truly subordinate to a Project Manager, you can still build a culture of providing useful signal from the field to them.

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