Business Acumen and a Successful Career
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.
“A project manager who doesn’t demonstrate to me that they are thinking in terms of value will never be anything other than a PM in my organization.”
That’s what a chief executive said to me recently. She was complaining that despite having spent a lot of money hiring and developing project managers to support significant growth in recent years, the organization was still making project decisions based on the work being done, not the value being delivered by that work.
You can argue that’s not just a project management problem—stakeholders and other key business roles have some accountability there, too. But her point is not isolated, I have heard similar comments from other executives with the underlying sentiment being that project managers and teams are still managing their initiatives with a focus primarily on the triple constraint.
The inability, or unwillingness, to adapt the work being done to optimize the value being delivered is an issue that many enterprises continue to struggle with.
The project manager mindset
As you can imagine, I speak with a lot of PMs about this and other topics, and there is no real consensus as to how business acumen impacts their work. Some continue to manage projects the way that they have always done because that’s what they (and their teams) are comfortable with, and see no need to …
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"The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter." - Mark Twain |
