Project Management is becoming an essential skill for leaders who want to bring more efficiency, structure, and impact to their teams. Maria Cunha Gomes, Legal Team Leader at SERVDEBT Group and alumna of Porto Business School’s Postgraduate Program in Project Management, found in the program the tools to transform legal coordination into a more agile, structured, and results-driven model.
In this interview, Maria shares how she applied methodologies such as Agile and Scrum to a legal context. She also reflects on leadership, teamwork, the Capstone Project, and how project management can become a driver of change in highly demanding professional environments.
Project Management in Law as a response to new challenges
What motivated you to choose Porto Business School’s Postgraduate Program in Project Management?
My motivation came from the need to take legal coordination to a new level of operational maturity. Over the past decade, as a Legal Team Leader managing non-performing loan portfolios, I have seen that credit recovery litigation brings challenges that the traditional legal approach cannot address with the necessary agility.
I felt the need to professionalize the way I coordinated my teams. I wanted to balance high case volumes and pressure for results with a more careful management of resources and budgets. My goal was to design models that could maximize asset recovery while reducing inefficiencies and eliminating wasted time and effort.
Project Management gave me the methodologies and conceptual rigor I was looking for. It offered a solid structure for the way I work. Porto Business School was the natural choice because it is a benchmark for excellence, combining academic depth with a practical and executive approach.
I was looking for a program that would give me confidence and the robustness needed to lead complex projects at the intersection of Law and a management mindset.
Agile and Scrum in a legal environment
How did the program contribute to your development in project management, particularly in methodologies such as Agile and Scrum?
The program at PBS broadened my understanding of methodologies I was not familiar with. It also challenged me to rethink the way I managed litigation in non-performing loan operations.
The postgraduate program gave me a more strategic view of credit monitoring and recovery. It also introduced me to diagnostic tools, such as the Ishikawa Diagram, which I now use to identify inefficiencies. From there, I learned how to plan, implement, and monitor action plans focused on root causes, using tools such as 5W2H.
The most significant practical application was the introduction of Scrum-based agile practices in a team that was undersized and under strong pressure to deliver results. Litigation is traditionally a very reactive environment, often focused on responding to urgent matters.
The biggest challenge, and also my greatest achievement, was creating space for what I call “invisible work.” These are dense and essential tasks, such as data verification and updates, asset checks, and strategic analysis. We managed to address them through incremental deliveries, without compromising the constant demands of daily judicial work.
We now concentrate our Sprints on these more complex tasks. I define the priorities in the Backlog, while the team estimates the effort required and decides what it can deliver in each Sprint. This disruptive dynamic was only possible because of the trust, openness, and commitment of my legal team, who embraced this new way of working with autonomy and responsibility.
Ultimately, the program helped me understand that even in a rigid legal context, it is possible to introduce agility. This brings greater predictability, better organization, and a more efficient and sustainable response capacity.
Leadership, teams, and psychological safety
Which learnings or moments from the program had the greatest impact on the way you manage projects?
Given my current role as a Legal Team Leader, people management is both the most challenging and the most rewarding part of my daily work. For that reason, the learnings from the Leadership and High-Performance Teams course resonated with me the most.
That course confirmed something I had always intuitively believed: results become more consistent, and workflows become more predictable, when there is a true team in place.
I learned that operational excellence emerges more naturally when we foster human sustainability and build relationships in an environment of trust and psychological safety. In that kind of environment, mistakes are not only acknowledged. They become an opportunity for reflection and improvement.
Today, for me, managing projects means creating that space of trust. It means building an environment without judgment or prejudice, where the team feels safe to share, learn, take risks, and innovate. This human foundation is what allows technical methodologies to truly work.
Recently, my perspective on teaming, which I deepened during the postgraduate program, gained international validation when I was selected to join The Reset Alliance, a restricted group of 100 global leaders. This collective integrates human well-being into performance strategy. It will allow me to collaborate with international decision-makers on redefining work models and bring that forward-looking perspective into the Portuguese context.
Capstone Project: where theory became practice
How would you describe the Capstone Project experience? What skills and insights did you take from that challenge?
I would describe the Capstone Project as exciting and deeply rewarding. We started as a group of people who barely knew each other, united by the desire to build something together. We ended as an aligned team, delivering a real value proposition for the company.
We had the opportunity to work with an organization of around 800 employees on a highly relevant challenge: reviewing and optimizing its training management process.
That was the moment when theory came to life. The greatest insight was realizing that even in established processes, there is always room for efficiency gains when we apply the rigor of project management.
As a group, we did more than observe. We designed concrete solutions to the challenges we identified. These included proposing a governance model for the training management process, defining a clear workflow calendar with critical milestones, and suggesting measurable indicators that would allow the organization to assess the real return on training.
As a lawyer, I am used to processes that are often rigid and highly regulated. I completed the Capstone Project with the conviction that these methodologies are universal. They can be applied across different areas and can turn “this is how it has always been done” into something that creates real value.
Team dynamics and collaborative learning
How did the class dynamics and teamwork contribute to your learning experience?
The postgraduate program has a strong practical component throughout. This is clear not only in the Capstone Challenge, but also in project competition courses and in the group assignments developed during the program.
Working toward a shared answer or common challenge encouraged brainstorming and teamwork at different levels. It also promoted the exchange and integration of diverse knowledge.
Looking back, I believe one of the program’s greatest differentiators is this opportunity to explore complementary expertise. It allowed me to understand different perspectives on the same topics. More importantly, it gave me the chance to adopt practices already used in other fields, such as engineering, and transfer them into my legal environment.
This exchange of experiences and cross-sector learning was, for me, the qualitative leap the program provided.
Why develop project management skills?
What advice would you give to someone considering developing project management skills?
In a constantly changing world, developing new skills should not be seen as a pastime or as an academic addition to a résumé. It is a requirement for adapting to the future.
Project management touches many different areas. It helps develop a holistic view of the corporate world, from strategic alignment to risk-based thinking.
The challenge is real, but the benefits are highly rewarding. My advice to anyone considering developing project management skills is simple: move from thought to action, and do not be afraid to step out of your comfort zone.
Regardless of your core area, by the end of the program you will understand how to apply the skills you have acquired to your own professional reality, whatever its specific characteristics may be.
Maria Cunha Gomes’ experience shows how Project Management can create new forms of leadership, collaboration, and efficiency. It also reinforces the role of executive education in transforming technical, demanding, and highly regulated fields.