On Time, On Budget… and Still Missing the Point
The reactions / questions on my last post made it clear that when hidden value is truly invisible, it often gets mistaken for “just doing the job.”
Quick reality check:
Have you ever been pulled into a project after it went completely sideways — right after someone said, “We didn’t need a PM for this”?
Have you ever been asked to manage a project only to find out they expected you to only schedule meetings, take notes & track action items? …while the real issues were: no owner, no decisions, no shared understanding, and vibes-based planning?
Have you ever delivered a project on time, in scope, and on budget — and still thought, “Wow, that was way harder than it ever should’ve been”?
Cool. Same.
Here’s the thing:
Delivery is the finish line.
Hidden value is everything that stopped the race from becoming a dumpster fire.
On-time / on-scope / on-budget is the scoreboard. That’s “table stakes” as some commented.
It tells you who crossed the line — not how they survived the course.
Hidden value is the invisible work:
• The risk you spotted early that never became “an urgent fire drill”
• The dependency you untangled before it blocked five teams
• The decision you forced before calendar Tetris began
• The scope you clarified before it quietly doubled
• The rework you prevented because someone finally asked, “Wait… why are we doing this?”
When this work is done well, nothing exciting happens.
No escalations.
No all-hands emergencies.
No heroic Slack messages at 11:47pm.
Which is exactly why people think it’s “just doing the job.”
It’s like good plumbing.
No one praises it when the house doesn’t flood — but everyone notices when it fails.
If leaders only look at delivery metrics, success looks inevitable.
Or worse… lucky.
They don’t see the preventative work - the decisions sped up, the chaos absorbed, the problems that never got a Jira ticket because they never happened.
That’s what I mean by hidden value.
It’s not fluff.
It’s not ego.
It’s not PMs asking for gold stars.
It’s making the deleted scenes visible so organizations stop confusing “nothing broke” with “nothing happened.”
Because if we only value outcomes, we’ll keep calling PMs after the wheels fall off and wondering why everything feels harder than it needs to be.
