Seventeen Years in Project Management,
and Why I Wrote My Own Software
Rather Than Buy It
STORY
By Naval Singh
Founder, NavalPM
Madras, India
Abstract
The Project Management Institute’s July 2026 refresh of the PMP certification distinguishes between perishable skills tied to a specific tool, durable skills and frameworks that transfer across tools, and enduring capabilities — judgment — that compound across a career. This commentary tests that distinction against a specific career that runs an unusual course: infrastructure execution on the ground, a foundational project management certification earned while working full-time, a decade inside large consulting and enterprise-platform organizations, a mid-career return to formal technical education in data science and machine learning, and finally, in 2026, the decision to build an independent project management software company rather than adopt an existing one. That last decision is the spine of the piece: choosing to build the tool rather than buy it is, in miniature, a wager that the underlying discipline of project management is better served by software designed around durable judgment than by software optimized for the metrics of a much larger company. The commentary traces each stage of that career for what it actually contributed — separating what turned out to be perishable from what turned out to be durable — and uses the answer to explain specific architectural and design decisions made while building the product, including its AI governance model, its native support for scaled-agile planning, and its approach to data portability. It closes with an argument that direct practitioner experience, including years spent on the vendor side of the very platforms practitioners depend on, is an underused source of product design authority in an industry increasingly built by people who have never run the projects the software is meant to serve.
Keywords: project management software; PMP certification; durable skills; career transitions; enterprise transformation; ServiceNow; data science education; AI governance; founder journey; accessibility
Introduction: Why Build the Car
There is an old argument in motorsport about why a team builds its own car rather than buying a chassis and an engine already proven to win. The bought car is faster to the grid and cheaper to field. The built car costs more, takes longer, and might not even be faster in its first season. But the team that builds understands every part of what they are racing, can fix what breaks without waiting on a supplier, and — this is the part usually left out of the romantic version of the story — actually owns what they learn in the process. I use this as a metaphor deliberately, not as a description of an actual project: I have never built a race car. But I have spent much of the last two years building a project management platform from scratch, one architectural decision at a time, when adopting Jira or Asana or monday.com and moving on with my life was sitting right there as the obviously cheaper option. This piece is an attempt to explain why I built the car instead, using the seventeen years before it — on infrastructure sites, in consulting rooms, inside an enterprise platform vendor, and, more recently, back in a classroom learning to actually write the software myself — as the evidence for why that decision was not impulsive.
The Project Management Institute’s own framing, introduced with its July 2026 PMP refresh, gives me useful language for this. PMI’s VP of Learning, Dr. Kelly Heuer, describes professional capability as a spectrum running from perishable skills — the specific tools and platforms essential only for today — through durable skills and frameworks that travel intact from one tool to the next, to enduring capabilities: judgment and mindset that compound across an entire career. What follows is my attempt to sort my own career onto that spectrum honestly, and to show my work.
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How to cite this article: Singh, N. (2026). Building My Own Car for the Race: Seventeen Years in Project Management, and Why I Wrote My Own Software Rather Than Buy It, story, PM World Journal, Vol. XV, Issue IX, September. Available online at https://pmworldjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/pmwj168-Sep2026-Singh-Buildiing-My-Own-Car-personal-story.pdf
About the Author
Naval Singh
Madras, India
Naval Singh began his career as a Project Engineer at Indian Oil Corporation (2009–2013), executing infrastructure and supply chain projects and managing on-site teams of 50 or more. In 2011 he earned a Post Graduate Certificate in Project Management from Indira Gandhi National Open University, completing the program First Division with Distinction. He completed an MBA/PGDM at the Indian Institute of Management, Indore (2013–2015), followed by roles as a Business Consultant at Infosys Consulting (2015–2016), a Strategy/Business Consultant at IBM (2016–2020) [title to confirm against internal records], and a Senior Consultant in Transformation Programs at ServiceNow (2020–2023) [title to confirm]. He holds a B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from the National Institute of Technology, Rourkela (2005–2009), and is currently completing a BS in Data Science and Applications at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, at the Degree level. In 2026 he founded NavalPM. Naval can be contacted at singhn9@gmail.com
