Career Crisis: When Foundational PM Skills Erode

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  

I recently had a very interesting conversation with a project manager who had been leading key initiatives for almost 30 years. They were the go-to person whenever their employer had a particularly important or complex project, and they were liked and respected by everyone from sponsors to team members. In many ways, they are the type of PM that many of us aspire to be, an example of just how successful a project manager can become.

But this PM was starting to feel uncomfortable. Her career had been spent in the plan-driven world, and her foundational skills were developed at a time when PMs still needed to be able to manually figure out critical paths and update Gantt charts.

Sure, there was software, but it wasn’t anywhere near as advanced as today’s tools. And it often felt as though the applications were creating as many challenges as they were helping to solve.

Now, with much better software tools, she was feeling as though she was becoming disconnected from some of that foundational “hard skill” PM activity because the software was more than capable of doing it all. This PM still had just as much information available to her, and it was generally higher quality than in the past. But because she hadn’t been as involved in the production and development of the schedule, risk register, etc., she didn’t feel as confident.

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