What Does a Project Manager Do Before the Work Even Begins?
Five questions I’d ask before rolling out phishing-resistant MFA to 1,000 employees.
This week in my Project Management learning journey, I explored how project objectives, scope, stakeholders, deliverables, and success criteria come together to guide a project.
To make the concepts practical, I considered a hypothetical cybersecurity scenario: what if an organization needed to roll out phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication (MFA) to 1,000 employees in eight weeks?
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The first step wouldn’t be to jump straight into deployment. It would be to get clear on five things:
- Objective: What outcome are we trying to achieve?
- Scope: What is included in the rollout, and what isn’t?
- Stakeholders: Who needs to be involved?
- Deliverables: What must the project produce?
- Key results: How will we measure success?
I also learned how OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) connect a broad objective to measurable outcomes. Rather than simply saying “improve account security,” a team can set an objective, such as making employee sign-ins resistant to phishing, and back it with specific, time-bound results. For example, 100% of employees were enrolled by week 8, at least 90% completed setup without help-desk support, and SMS and one-time code sign-ins were switched off by the same deadline.
My biggest takeaway this week is that successful project delivery starts with clarity, alignment, and measurable outcomes, not just getting tasks done.
This learning is meaningful to me because I’m building on my cybersecurity experience while developing my project management skills. I want to understand not only the technology behind a solution but also how people, processes, and planning make delivery successful.
Thank you to DevCareer and Coursera for supporting this learning journey.
When starting a technical project, what would you define first: the objective, the scope, or the success criteria?
