to understand and articulate why they are "required." Because someone must get value out of them, right? My Previous Reason "Why" Early in my career as a Project Manager, I thought the value of project management lay in the inherent effectiveness and efficiencies gained by managing work efforts as projects. From my perspective, the discipline of project management was the keys to the efficiency kingdom. For many years, I understood the "why" of Project Management to be simply "because" the outcomes are much greater and more efficient when managed via teams than by summing up individual efforts. Other tangible examples include: Gantt charts are effective ways of visualizing work efforts and resource conflicts; Risk and issue logs are efficient ways of articulating what might or what is currently knocking the project off course; Communication plans set expectations for communicating. And so this version of my "why Project Management" worked for a while. However, as I worked on bigger projects, I discovered that even in "successful" projects (with success measured as on-time and on-budget), the end product sometimes failed to meet the expectations, the stakeholders were dissatisfied, and the investment of dollars ultimately did not generate the expected return. Since those experiences didn't quite feel like a success, I began to question the foundation of my old "why" theory. My New Reason "Why" Even though projects that are delivered on-time and on-budget may make a PM's bonus bigger, that act of delivering the product of a project does not necessarily generate