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Gartner PPM & IT Governance Summit
May 20-22, 2013 | National Harbor, MD
Perception vs. Reality
Andy Jordan PMP is the founder and president of Roffensian Consulting. Andy is a seasoned business professional with experience in many industries on two continents. After a career managing high profile, business critical projects for many organisations Andy moved into leadership of project management offices and built a reputation for building, rescuing and improving this key function. His approach of tailoring processes to the style and ability of the organisation, and focusing on the development of project staff rather than the short sighted approach of meeting project deliverables at all costs has repeatedly shown dramatic results.
At a recent event, I met a project manager who was clearly demoralized with the profession. In conversation with her, she felt that her work was not being appreciated by the leadership in her organization. More significantly, she felt that management was not focused on the right things in determining whether she was successful in her role--of course the overall project success was important, but management was focused on status reporting, process compliance, meeting attendance, etc.--tangible measures that were easy to judge compliance with, but were not necessarily the most meaningful measures of success.
It was a disappointing conversation, not least because I experienced something similar early in my career when a manager who didn’t really understand project management said to me in a performance review, “I think that you feel that I don’t appreciate you. I do, but I’m not sure why”.
Ouch.
Although the industry has made some progress since those days, there is clearly still a problem in some organizations of a lack of understanding about how project managers are contributing to the success of the organization.
Measuring project management
I think that the core issue here is that measuring the performance of a project manager can be difficult. There is one very obvious measure of success--whether the project was delivered on …
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