A New Set of Technical PM Skills?

A New Set of Technical PM Skills?

Andy Jordan

– January 15, 2020

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at andy.jordan@roffensian.com. Andy’s new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

Technical project management. It’s this month’s ProjectManagement.com theme, and of course it’s one of the three arms of PMI’s Talent Triangle®. We all know what people mean when they talk about technical project management—risk management, scheduling, estimating, quality management, etc.

But are those still the actual technical skills project managers need in 2020? Or have things moved on in the “real world”…and the definition simply hasn’t caught up?

Those things are still important of course, so in that regard the elements of technical project management are still relevant for PMs. But those are also the areas of project management that have benefited most from advances in software tools.

That’s a perfectly logical development—it’s far easier to develop tools to deliver the hard skills of project management than it is the soft skills that are much more subjective and require interpretation, analysis and judgment. But it also means that technical project management is the area of project delivery that has morphed and changed the most over the last 20 years or so.

I’m not suggesting that a PM just needs to enter a few data points into a piece of software and a ready-made project schedule and supporting plans will spit out the other end, but I am suggesting that project managers need …

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Published at Wed, 15 Jan 2020 05:00:00 +0000