Personal Process Management

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   New Practitioners  

As project managers, we are very used to working within a formal process framework. Regardless of the project execution methodology that you have in place within your organization, the nature of projects dictates that they are managed through the completion of a number of distinct actions that come together to form the overall process framework. Some of those approaches tend to be fairly formal (a typical waterfall-based approach, for example), while others tend to be less structured--agile being the obvious one (the Agile Manifesto actually begins by saying “We prefer individuals and interactions over processes and tools”).

Regardless of the level of formality, detail and rigidity, every structured project management approach has some degree of process infrastructure to support it. However, all of those approaches focus on the organizational perspective--they provide guidelines that a generic PM follows to maximize their chances of success in delivering the project. That’s important, but in this article I want to build on that concept and look at things from the perspective of an individual project manager--personal processes and how you can use them to improve your personal performance.

What is personal process management?
Let’s start by looking at exactly what I mean by “personal process management” so that we all have the …

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