Project Management Has Come a Long Way—and the Best is Yet to Come

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   Change Management   Leadership  

When I first started managing projects, the idea that there would be a day dedicated to project management was laughable. As PMs, we weren’t popular (to put it mildly), at least in many industries where it was relatively new to the mainstream having expanded from construction, engineering, and military disciplines.

I worked in a number of organizations where there were active efforts being made by department managers to deliver their projects in secret, hoping to get the work completed before anyone found out about them and appointed a project manager.

I also sat in a meeting where a VP gave the CEO a cost and schedule estimate to complete a business-critical customer product and then looking directly at me said, “Of course, those numbers only hold true if we can deliver without a project manager. Otherwise, it’s going to cost a lot more and take a lot longer.”

The CEO bought it. I left the company.

Now I’m old, but not that old. This was only in the first part of the 1990s. But look at project management now. As we celebrate International Project Management (IPM) Day, we are part of a profession that is in demand, growing, and generally well-respected across geographic regions and industries.

Is it perfect? No, of course not. But it has come a long way in the last three decades, and it continues to evolve in new and exciting ways. (…

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