Any Which Way

Janis is an award-winning journalist and editor who has covered many industries beyond project management, including health care, financial services, higher education and retail sales.

  ProjectsAtWork  

Can projects be managed by skill alone, without industry-specific knowledge? In other words, can you do condos and code?

You have peers in industries ranging from construction and healthcare to entertainment and technology. Everyone has roughly the same title-project manager. But are you interchangeable? Can you oversee a bridge construction this year and a computer program the next? Would you want to? Moreover, could you find an employer willing to let you try?

Since project management is an evolving profession, there's an ongoing debate about what it means to be a project manager. Some say project management skills are easily transported from job to job while others are convinced that project management skills are only useful when blended with industry-specific knowledge.

Opinions are often tied to project managers' own career choices. Some embrace job changes and the challenge of the unknown; others prefer sticking with one field, building expertise based on experience.

Either way, nobody disputes the value of some industry-specific knowledge, so the question becomes how much is necessary for project success? There's no one right amount. It depends on individual comfort levels and whether project managers tend to emphasize the "project" or the "manager" in their title. People who …

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