The Case for (and Against) Specialized PMs

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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When I first started managing projects, there were two distinct categories of project management. There were the IT (or technical) project managers, and then everyone else.

The belief was that managing an IT project required a degree of technical experience and understanding that the average PM wouldn’t have. This was at a time when technology wasn’t as mainstream as it is now, so it had some logic to it. But even then (in the early 1990s), there was pushback.

I was certainly on the business side of the equation, but from the outset I was managing projects that involved the implementation of technology. In many of my early projects, I was partnered with an IT PM who handled the technical work packages while I handled the business side. But that wasn’t a sustainable model, either. So, I sought to move into roles that would allow me to manage entire initiatives, and that led to a number of interviews where my technical capabilities were challenged.

My response was always that I knew enough to understand what the technical team was telling me—but not enough to be able to do their job for them. I thought that was a good thing, and eventually I found a hiring manager who agreed with me.

Pretty soon after that, we started to see more widespread recognition that project managers didn’t need to be specialists in particular disciplines. And that…

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