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.
If you are a project manager, your job is probably somewhat different to what it was a few years ago. Technology has driven considerable automation into many of the administrative functions associated with the role, reducing the amount of limited- or no-value work project managers must perform. I don’t know many PMs who are upset with that!
However, the expectations of the role have also evolved for many PMs. Those leading business projects have found an increasing expectation for them to understand the business areas they support—acting as proxies for those business roles during the project execution phase and managing to deliver on benefits rather than simply focusing on scope, schedule and cost.
For PMs who have traditionally been focused on specialist initiatives, the situation is a little different. They are finding there is less call for their specialist skills and abilities over and above project management because people in those specialist roles already have project management fundamentals as part of their skill set. As a result, specialist-style PMs are becoming more commoditized.
Neither of these changes is necessarily bad, but they are different from what PMs expected—and that requires project managers to adapt their career goals and ambitions. At the same time, there is strong evidence that the demand for project management skills
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Published at Thu, 02 Nov 2017 04:00:00 +0000
