How Do Project Managers Gain Business Acumen?

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.

  Career Development   Organizational Project Management   Strategy  

Quick: Give me a definition of business acumen. Come on, it can’t be that hard. It’s one of the three elements of the PMI Talent Triangle®.

Except, it is hard. Not because no one knows what it means, but because it means different things to different people—and can legitimately encompass different skills in different industries and functional areas, often without a tremendous amount of overlap.

Ask Google, and its AI tool will happily give you something. Wikipedia has something a bit better, but honestly, not much. And literally thousands of other sources will give you their own perspectives with varying degrees of objectivity.

Does it matter if we can’t define it? Well, that depends. Business acumen isn’t just an area where you need to earn PDUs, it’s a critical skill that can be the difference between success and failure on your projects. So you have to understand it. And if you aren’t sure what it means in your individual context, can you truly understand it?

To me, business acumen isn’t a specific set of skills, it’s more of a catchall phrase for the combination of skills, knowledge and comprehension that come together to answer all of the why questions around a project. And in an ideal world, I do mean all the whys. Not just why are we doing this project, but also why aren’t we doing something …

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