The Transferable PM

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  

We all know of the age-old debate about whether a project manager needs to be a subject matter expert in the areas that a project impacts. There’s no easy or definitive answer, and I don’t intend to stir up that debate here. However, I do want to look at whether the industry that a project manager operates in is important. I see a lot of job postings for project managers that specify a requirement for X years of experience in a specific industry, and that often makes me wonder, “What makes that industry so unique that a PM can’t be successful if they aren’t familiar with it?”

Industry or discipline?
I was discussing the premise for this article with a colleague and he opined that there were clearly some major differences between industries--he made the argument that construction projects were very different to drug research projects, and it was naïve to expect a project manager who had spent their career with one type of project to be capable of managing the other.

I understand his perspective, but I would argue that has nothing to do with industry--that’s what I would refer to as “discipline” or project type. This is more than just semantics--I wouldn’t expect someone to move immediately (I would expect them to be able to transition if given time to adapt) from project management of a drug research …

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