You Know That’s an Equilateral Triangle, Right?

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.

The PMI Talent Triangle® has been a very positive enhancement to the professional development process. The formal recognition that each of the three elements are critical to success has helped to ensure project managers don’t become too focused on just one element of the discipline. However, I think there is still room for improvement in how it is perceived.

Let’s start with a bit of a refresher. The PMI Talent Triangle® identifies three distinct areas of project management skills:

  • Technical project management
  • Leadership
  • Strategic and business management

The expectation is that project managers will be competent in each of these areas, and attempts are made to enforce that. For example, holders of the PMP® have to earn a minimum of 35 PDUs from the education category. There must be at least eight PDUs from each of the three elements. However, this is where I think there is a bit of a disconnect. I see a lot of project managers who only focus on one area of the triangle until they get their minimum of eight PDUs—and then ignore it. That’s not the idea.

I completely understand why PMI provides a degree of flexibility with the distribution of PDUs across the different areas. Some people need to focus more on one area than another, some employers place more value on some elements, etc. Providing freedom for the 11 or more …

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Published at Thu, 28 Mar 2019 04:00:00 +0000