Is It Your Problem to Solve?

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.

  Leadership  

It’s no surprise that problem-solving is a PM power skill. Projects can often have problems during delivery, and the project manager has a vital role in solving them either directly, or through collaboration with others. But problem-solving is also an area where I see a lot of PMs struggle, and not necessarily for the reasons that you might think.

During our project management career, all of us will have likely had problems we have struggled to overcome:

• That need to juggle the schedule to recover from a delay where everything that we tried seemed to create more challenges.
• The risk management approaches that never seemed to do anything to reduce exposure.
• The stakeholder who never engages no matter how many ways we try to accommodate their needs.

There’s no shortage of potential problems for PMs, and no shortage of stubborn issues to deal with.

But in my experience, even inexperienced project managers are fairly comfortable trying to handle those. While success may be elusive, the process of engaging with a problem and working through different possible solutions, in collaboration with others where necessary, is something that PMs tend to embrace.

The problem is, many PMs also embrace other problems.

Is it your problem?
There is an argument to be made for every project problem being a project manager’s problem. After all, if the …

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