In Honor of IPM Day

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 [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

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The first Thursday in November is here again. That means that I am another year older, another year balder and another year, um, chubbier. It also means that it’s International Project Management Day (IPM Day) again. It seems appropriate that I am writing this article for ProjectManagement.com this year--can there be any better place to champion the profession?

Last year in this article I celebrated the project team, the various people who helped those of us who are project managers to achieve our success. Let’s recognize those teams again--they make us what we are, and we couldn’t deliver anything without them. However, this year I want to focus on project managers, because they are a huge part of what project management is about.

In celebration of PMs
Many, many years ago when I was working for a large organization, I had a performance review with my manager. I was actually quite looking forward to it because I thought that I had had a pretty good year. The projects that I had managed had been successful, I had a good relationship with my teams and the sponsors seemed happy. Surely a positive review, a substantial raise and massive bonus was in my near future!

The first words uttered by my manager still haunt me to this day: “Andy, I think that you think that I don’t appreciate you. I do, but I don’t know why.”

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