Part 3: Preserving Your Program for Your Career and Community
"The Great Uncertainty" Series: Preparing for your program's cancellation
If you are facing the prospect of your program’s termination, a question that can feel both noisy and muted simultaneously is “What should you do to preserve your program?”; not for your company, but for yourself and your professional community.
Your career does not end with a single job. Your future job opportunities will rely on your ability to effectively communicate your past work and accomplishments, often with quantitative evidence. Particularly if your program’s work is aligned with your long-term career goals; ensuring access to your program’s information, regardless of your employment status, is tremendously valuable.
For program management professionals (PgMPs), maintaining a deep and fulfilling career means preserving your work for future use over the long term.
The Great Uncertainty Series
Over the last several months, the United States government has continued to reduce the size of many federal branches, freeze research dollars, and cut grants to non-profits. Further, new tariffs are expected to reorganize many industries. You're far from alone if you're caught up in this tsunami of change. Given that much of the work under fire is administrative, program management professionals (PgMPs) are a huge part of the workforce impacted by the recent economic upheaval.
This series, “The Great Uncertainty,” offers advice on preparing your program and your career for the prospect of cancellation. These insights come from a mixture of my experiences with program decline and cancellation, as well as what I’m reading about in the news, particularly here in Boston.
If you are new to the series, check out previous installments. “Part 1: The Challenges covered the retraction of the program management profession and the specific problems faced by PgMPs. “Part 2: Program Advocacy taught how to create an elevator pitch so you're ready to communicate your program’s value on any fateful day.
What does “preserving” your program even mean?
One fallacy I’ve had to relearn is that when a job ends, it’s gone. Indeed, when you do walk out the door from a dreary job, the weight lifts off your shoulders and you feel physically lighter. Conversely, when you leave a dream job, it can feel like tearing away a limb. There’s no one way or right way to think about the end of a job.
BUT “it’s not over until it’s over.” You’re so right, Yogi Berra.
Regardless of whether your job was hated or beloved, there’s a juxtaposition that while the job ends, your career continues. With hiring essentially depending on your education and past work experiences, more so now with everyone’s career histories accessible on LinkedIn, everything you’ve done before influences what comes next. You will do your future self a massive favor by considering how you can “preserve” your program’s information while you still have access to all the files.
Company vs. career-focused program preservation
Traditional guidance on program preservation often concerns preserving your work so your team can operate smoothly in your potential absence. I’ve usually discussed this with a program team using the intro, “If I get hit by a bus, then…” So far, neither I nor my colleagues have been hit by this much-discussed bus, but many have moved on to new, exciting jobs.
In these good times, you should absolutely enact a stellar offboarding plan, ensure your Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) are current, and train new personnel on your responsibilities. These actions will leave your soon-to-be former colleagues with a strong, positive impression of your work ethic, keeping your network healthy.
However, the prospect of leaving due to a layoff or program termination changes the calculus. Your colleagues will understand why there’s no offboarding plan and a bumpy transition. With lower consequences to your reputation, you can decide how to spend your time and energy in the last potential weeks or months at your job. That leaves the door open to devote time to preserving the program for yourself and even for the benefit of your wider professional community.
Tactically, career-focused program preservation means finding ways to make the details of your program accessible to you and potentially your broader professional community, either through indirect public documentation or direct legal means.
What is the value of program information once I’m out of the job?
Right now, I’m filling out an application for a Program Management Professional (PgMP) certification administered through the Project Management Institute (PMI). As part of the application process, I’ve had to account for ~15 years of project and program work in sizable detail (dates/budgets/processes/team size/goals/measures). Having done a so-so job of keeping my professional records at hand, it’s taken 9.5 hours to excavate all the needed details, including a sizable amount of reflective work to recall what I never documented. This situation is one example of how the specific details of your program might come up years later.
Career-focused program preservation aims to a) help you apply for future professional opportunities, b) legally use the tools, measures, processes, and data developed in future work, and c) ensure your work’s findings advance your professional community’s knowledge base.
Actions to preserve your program
Publish: Get documentation of your program’s mission, successes, products, and data into the public sphere. While the intellectual property (IP) and raw data sets are the company’s property, anything written into public articles will be accessible, regardless of your employment status. Write articles, post speeches, share your slides in conference compendiums, or - if allowed - regularly post about work successes on professional social media sites. Most importantly, include the numbers wherever possible. Your posts may not go viral on LinkedIn, but that little nugget of information will be there for you and potentially a future hiring manager to see when scrolling through your profile a year from now.
Make your “go-bag” of employment documentation: While you cannot take the company’s IP (i.e., your program’s tools, SOP, datasets) without legal permission, it is typically appropriate to keep documents related to your employment and performance at the company. Make copies for your personal career files of all your performance reviews; the log of projects and programs you’ve accomplished with dates and names of people who worked on the project; and, for good measure, any files related to benefits, leaves, etc. You'll have the basic facts for future job searches and professional opportunities. Further, if you’re in a career transition and need to do deeper reflective work, you’ll have a key resource of your former managers' impressions of your work, with the details you may not recall years later.
Imagine your startup: While the IP of a program lives with the company, the expertise, skills, and insights inside your head are still yours. If your current program has untapped potential and/or represents what you want to keep doing in the long term, start playing around with the idea of what your own original business might look like. Maybe it’s an independent consulting firm, developing a product, content creation, or going freelance. If losing the IP you developed (but don’t own) hurts – and it does - the advantage of “being your own boss” is that you own the IP in the future. While the startup life is far from suitable or an option for everyone, remember that the skill set you’ve gained in program management strongly overlaps with creating an independent service/product/program. Small actions like listening to podcasts on entrepreneurship will expand your view about where your expertise could take you, unencumbered by the restrictions of a larger organization. If you’re looking for a place to get started, one of my favorite entrepreneurship podcasts is “Small Business Made Simple” by a cheery Australian named Jenn Donovan.
Ask questions about keeping the program: If your entire program could be terminated, investigate what would be involved in keeping the program’s documentation and datasets. A simple first step would be to check your employee handbook to read your company’s policies. If you have trusting relationships with knowledgeable employees (manager, HR, legal), have private conversations about what might be possible. Further, if you are in a layoff conversation or hear about incentive deals for voluntarily leaving, you can always try to negotiate to keep the files. That permission needs to be far more than a verbal go-ahead from a boss to copy the files and bring them home. You’re seeking legal permission to give you reasonable use of the materials in other publications, business ventures, etc. Even if you don’t have a distinct plan for what you might do with the information, if there’s any chance of keeping what you’ve developed, try for it. It's admittedly far from standard business practices and a long shot, but you never know in these tumultuous times.
“Have You Ever Seen the Rain?”
In more regular times, program preservation work should be a consistent activity in any job, but often gets deprioritized by more urgent program development goals. Use this limbo to take a needed pause on the “what’s next” and work on career-focused program preservation. This admittedly negative time on the job can still be tremendously valuable towards reaching your larger career goals and supporting your professional community through knowledge-sharing.
As an end note (all puns intended), I add inspirational music to underscore the article’s themes. To honor preservation, this article’s soundtrack is “Have You Ever Seen the Rain,” written in 1971 by Creedence Clearwater Revival. Nothing preserves an era better than music. 😊