This is a guest post by Christian Knutson, P.E., PMP, leadership coach, civil engineer, author and an accomplished professional specializing in A/E/C work internationally. You can read more of Christian’s work at The Engineer Leader, a recognized blog on leadership and life success for engineers and professionals.
Maintaining A Project Portfolio
It doesn’t matter if you’re working private or public sector, having easy and quick access to work you’ve led, directed, managed, or implemented is important. Prospective employers and colleagues are two obvious recipients of this data. A not so obvious one is you.
I’ve been moving through a transition the past year going from public to what appeared to be private sector. One item I highlighted immediately when I began building my targeted resumes was the need to easily and quickly highlight the programs and projects I’d been involved with the past twenty years. This task was easy in theory, but not so easy in implementation. My recollection of projects I worked on eighteen years ago in Korea had become clouded. Gone were the details of the scope of a particular airfield upgrade project, the costs, the challenges, and how they were resolved. What remained was a general sense of it being really challenged from schedule and logistics and it consuming my time and energy for most of my twelve month assignment. And my memories of the details of the multi-million dollar infrastructure program I led in Kuwait in 1999? Cloudy like an August Haboob sandstorm.
Better to be consistently maintaining a portfolio of your work. The artist's portfolio is an edited collection of their best work intended to showcase their style or method of work. It’s used to show employers how versatile they can be by showing different samples of current work, typically reflecting the artist’s best work or a depth in one area of work. Applied to your engineering or project management work, the projects you select reflect your versatility or depth of your best work. At a minimum, the data to collect includes:
- Project Scope, Cost, Location, Key Dates, and Client
- Description of the work included in the project
- Key challenges and what you did personally to overcome these challenges
- Reference names/contact details
- A recommendation letter and/or key words from an associated post-project evaluation
- Imagery of the project
Collecting this material during or immediately after a project is infinitely easier than attempting to bring it together years after the project is closed. And this doesn’t need to be a complex filing system. I use a Word document and structure the data I collect off the Standard Form 330. Take my advice: don’t wait until you need it to have a project portfolio. Work it now when you have the time to collate the data.
“A portfolio of work is a curated experience. It’s an applicant’s chance to shape the way that I’m viewing his or her approach, methods, process, and best thinking; but oftentimes, a portfolio only contains final pieces, as applicants are overly concerned about presenting perfection. Polish doesn’t communicate process though, and therefore I’m left with only part of the story. Messy problems — and how applicants work through them — can show a great deal more in a portfolio than one finished, airtight solution. It’s then the applicant’s job to curate those into an experience for the portfolio viewer.” Liz Danzico
Image courtesy of xedos4 and FreeDigitalPhotos.net