Does Your Employer Understand the Talent Triangle®?

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.

You won’t find many employers who believe that technical project management skills are optional for a project manager. Sure, they may have different ideas about what is included in those skills and which are the most important, but they will still recognize that you need to have the basics to be a PM.

Similarly, there isn’t going to be much argument from an employer when it comes to the need for leadership skills among project managers. Project management is a people-focused discipline (now more than ever before), and if you don’t have the ability to build teams, empower and motivate people, and communicate clearly, you won’t have a long project management career.

But what about strategic and business management? That’s an area where not every employer believes project managers need to have skills. And that’s a problem. Not only because PMI has now made that category of skills a mandatory part of the certification process, but more importantly because it is a critical part of project execution in modern organizations. If employers don’t recognize that, then it makes me concerned that the way they execute projects is fundamentally flawed.

The need for strategic and business management skills
I’ve been fairly vocal in recent years about my belief that project managers should be focused on the business outcomes their …

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Published at Wed, 20 Mar 2019 04:00:00 +0000