By Anna Ladipo
July 15, 2026
Project management is a transferable discipline. The frameworks, the methodologies, the people skills and the process thinking all move across industries. But transferability is not the same as interchangeability. The project managers (PMs) who rise fastest in any industry are rarely the ones with the best credentials. They are the ones who take the time to understand the business deeply enough to manage it strategically.
I spent a significant portion of my project management career in the insurance industry across multiple companies, and moved through different lines of business, including life, property and casualty, title, and group benefits. I also hold the Fellow of Life Management Insurance designation through LOMA,
One engagement shaped how I think about the relationship between business knowledge and PM effectiveness more than any other: a benchmark pricing framework initiative at a prominent Canadian insurance company, working with senior leaders including the Chief Actuary, VP of Underwriting, VP of Operations, and the Business Intelligence Director.
What that engagement taught me goes well beyond the insurance industry. It is a lesson about what it means to manage at the intersection of people, process, and technology, especially in an organization where managing risk is central to the business. Here are the key lessons I learned.
1. Understand the core assumptions before you manage the work.
Insurance products are not priced arbitrarily. Behind every premium, every policy limit, and every coverage exclusion is a set of actuarial assumptions — statistical models that project the likelihood and cost of future claims based on historical data, risk factors, and regulatory requirements. When you are the PM responsible for translating those models into a working technology platform, you need to understand what you are building before you can manage it.
The project involved moving the underwriting process from a manual workflow to a web-based pricing tool. That sounds straightforward until you consider the tool had to contain business and technical rules, and actuarial assumption that underwriters had previously applied through judgment and experience. Four business areas with different priorities, different data sets, and different definitions of accuracy all had to align on a single system.
The Chief Actuary was not simply a subject matter expert. He was the keeper of the assumptions the entire product was built on. If those assumptions were translated incorrectly into the system, the pricing would be wrong. If the pricing was wrong, the business was exposed. Understanding that changed how I managed every conversation, every requirement session, and every sign-off in that engagement.
Best practice: Before you manage a project, understand what the business is actually doing — not at the level of a project brief, but at the level of why the work matters to the organization’s core function. That understanding changes every decision you make as a PM.
2. People are the first line of risk management.
The insurance industry does not just sell risk management as a product. It practices it as a culture. Every process, every approval layer, every governance structure exists because someone modelled the consequences of getting it wrong. That culture is the institutional memory of what happens when assumptions fail.
Getting four business areas aligned on the same initiative was the most complex challenge on that project, far more so than any architecture decision. Actuarial, Underwriting, Operations, and Business Intelligence each brought a different mental model of what the pricing tool needed to do.
Actuaries think in statistical distributions. Underwriters think in risk appetite. Operations teams think in workflow. Business Intelligence teams think in data structure. A PM who treats all four groups as interchangeable stakeholders will produce requirements that satisfy none of them. A PM who understands how each group thinks can design a process that brings them to genuine alignment.
This is what The PMBOK® Guide—Eighth Edition is now emphasising explicitly: the people dimension is not secondary to the technical work. It is the primary work. Strategic alignment starts with understanding the people who hold the knowledge, the authority, and the risk.
Best practice: Map your stakeholders not just by influence and interest, but by how they think about the problem. The path to alignment runs through understanding, not through process alone.
3. Find where the real risk in your project lives.
The pricing tool was, technically speaking, a software development project. What made it difficult was the volume and specificity of business and technical rules that had to be encoded accurately — every underwriting guideline, every actuarial calculation, every exception scenario that experienced underwriters had previously applied through judgment, now documented and built into a tool a new underwriter could use on day one.
That is not a technology problem. It is a knowledge transfer problem with a technology solution. Understanding that changed how the project was managed — more time in requirements validation, more review cycles with the actuarial team, and every sign-off treated as a risk mitigation event, not just a milestone. In insurance, a requirement that is wrong is not a change request. It is a liability.
Best practice: Ask where an error in this project would have the greatest business impact. Focus your most rigorous validation, testing, and sign-off processes on these high-risk areas.
4. Depth accelerates. Know the industry you are managing in.
The PMBOK® Guide—Eighth Edition marks a meaningful shift in how the profession defines project success. The emphasis has moved beyond task completion and delivery within constraints to strategic alignment and value realization. Success is judged by the outcomes a project achieves, and how well it supports the organisation’s strategi objectives.
For project managers, this means understanding the business context is essential. You ask better planning questions. You escalate risks that could affect business outcomes. You communicate with senior leadership in the language of business outcomes rather than project status. You make trade-off decisions grounded in what the business can and cannot afford.
Project management is broad enough to take you anywhere. But depth accelerates. Pursuing the FLMI while working in insurance was one of the best professional decisions I made, not because it added a credential, but because it changed how I thought. When you understand an industry’s regulatory environment, its risk culture, and its core assumptions, you move from being a PM who delivers projects to being a PM who delivers strategic value.
Best practice: Identify one credential, relationship, or learning opportunity that deepens your knowledge of the industry you work in. Business knowledge is a PM accelerator.
Your Checklist: 4 Principles for Industry-Aware Project Management
Use these four principles as a practical guide for managing projects in industries where business context, risk, and customer impact must shape every decision.
| Project Management Principle | Apply It Today | |
|---|---|---|
| ☐ | Know the business | Spend time understanding the core function of the business you are in. Ask your sponsor what success looks like in business terms, not project terms. |
| ☐ | Map how stakeholders think | Go beyond influence and interest. Understand each stakeholder group's mental model of the problem and design your engagement strategy around those differences. |
| ☐ | Find where real risk lives | Ask where an error in this project would hurt the business most. Focus your most rigorous validation and sign-off discipline there. |
| ☐ | Invest in industry depth | Identify one credential, relationship, or learning opportunity that deepens your knowledge of the industry you work in. Business knowledge is a project management accelerator. |
A Final Reflection
Project management is, at its core, a discipline of anticipation. You identify what needs to happen, what could go wrong, and what the consequences of getting it wrong would be.
The insurance industry practices that same discipline as a business model. Working in insurance has sharpened how I think about risk, about the specificity of business rules, and what it means to manage something the organization cannot afford to get wrong.
PM is broad enough to take you anywhere. The PMs who go furthest are the ones who go deep enough to understand where they are. Know the business. Manage the business. Deliver value the business can measure. That is where the most meaningful work happens.
Anna Ladipo
Anna Ladipo is an Associate Professor and Academic Director of a Project Management Certificate Program at a leading research university in Texas where she teaches graduate-level courses in project management, operations management, and leadership.
With over 20 years of experience leading enterprise transformation programs at Fortune 500 companies across banking, insurance, and financial services, Anna brings real-world executive expertise into the classroom and beyond. Her work sits at the intersection of industry, academia, entrepreneurship, and professional development equipping leaders at every stage with the tools to deliver results.
As the founder of NGSIT Inc. and its subsidiary Luxstopp, she has delivered project management and leadership training to corporate clients across North America while supporting entrepreneurs and small business owners in building and scaling their online presence.
