Program Manager, Mentor, PMI Emerging Leader

In Program Manager Rittik Guha’s national security role at Booz Allen, he works with the Department of Defense (DOD) to implement the latest AI technology. However, his most recent professional development happened on the other side of the world, with peers from Canada, the UK, Ireland, Colombia, and beyond.

The event was an Emerging Leaders Conference—an innovative and exclusive program hosted by the Project Management Institute (PMI) in Berlin, Germany. It’s a program that’s building the global project management profession.

Rittik reflects on project management, what he’s learning through the emerging leaders program, and how he’s sharing his knowledge to build his team, the firm, and the next generation of project management professionals.

PMI defines project management as the practice of planning, organizing, and executing the tasks needed to turn a brilliant idea into a tangible product, service, or deliverable. Rittik calls it “a concept that can be applied to anything,” such as planning your day, managing your budget, or renovating your home.

At Booz Allen, this “anything” involves managing schedules, mitigating risk, negotiating with vendors, recruiting teams, and more. It can mean both internal projects across thousands of employees and billions in contract vehicles and external projects to help federal agencies operate more effectively in defense, health, public safety, and beyond.

Groups of projects are centralized and coordinated through a project management office (PMO) which sets, maintains, and enforces standards, practices, and policies to keep everything on track. In his work with AI and DOD, Rittik currently leads a PMO of 15 partners.

In his time at Booz Allen, Rittik has taken on a diverse array of roles, including working on proposals, managing government-wide contracts, scheduling, and running Monte Carlo simulations on risk. He’s continuing his learning through events like the Emerging Leaders Conference.

The Emerging Leaders program introduces participants to fresh perspectives, innovative problem solving, and colleagues from around the world, both peers and seasoned professionals. For employers, it helps to build a pipeline of capable individuals ready to step up into senior roles.

Things happened fast once he arrived at the conference in Berlin, Rittik recalls. “I met my team, then immediately we’re sitting in a meeting space to work through our challenge statements.”

The Emerging Leaders program tailors challenge statements to each participant. Rittik’s challenge statement was: How can organizations strategically elevate project management to drive innovation, adaptability, and project success throughout their entire structure?

The answer, which Rittik discovered and presented in the closing session of the conference, involves “a recipe” of people, capabilities, knowledge management, and behaviors. “All of these create and sustain a culture of learning that catalyzes innovation and adaptability—for individual projects and across the entire organization,” says Rittik.

Through his many roles at Booz Allen, Rittik has embodied the firm’s culture of learning, gaining and sharing knowledge along the way.

He’s a liaison to Booz Allen’s internal PM Council, where he shared best practices for improving PMO performance from the Emerging Leaders program to leaders across the firm. After the conference in Berlin, he presented what he learned to a panel of Booz Allen’s major contract managers.

PowerPoints and presentations are just one way Rittik is sharing what he’s learned. He’s a mentor for Booz Allen’s Business Operations Leadership Development Program, and in his day-to-day job, he’s busy training junior staff on new skill sets and capabilities and connecting members of his growing network to new opportunities.

This includes the network he’s gained through the Emerging Leaders Conference. Now that he’s a program graduate, Rittik is part of the Booz Allen selection committee for the next session’s nominees and the PMI Advisory Committee for the Emerging Leaders Program. He’ll also present more insights related to his challenge statement at a session in Nashville this fall.

“We’ll be taking a deeper dive into what questions or framework an organization can use to understand their current operations and then build an achievable and sustainable plan to evolve,” he says.

Getting invited back isn’t a guarantee, Rittik explains, and he’s both honored and looking forward to what’s ahead. “The experience has been phenomenal—and unique,” he says.