A Call for Community Collaboration

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.

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Most of you have probably seen e-mails and announcements here at ProjectManagement.com about the “Redefining the PMO” workshops that have been running in the United States this year. I have been privileged to be working with Michael Wood and Mark Price Perry on these workshops, and have found them to be tremendously rewarding--as I believe have attendees.

One of the characteristics of those sessions is an open-space style discussion on the afternoon of the second day where attendees are invited to identify any challenges that they are experiencing, or topics that they want to discuss. Everyone then provides input and insight into those topics, and the power of the group can help to identify courses of action, potential causes of difficulty, creative solutions, etc. It’s been very well received by workshop participants, and it made me think that there must be opportunities for us as a community to work together in this way more often.

That’s what I want to explore in this article--some ways that we as a community can recreate these open-space style sessions, and in doing so enhance the quality of project management within our own areas of influence.

Existing communities
I don’t want to turn this article into criticism of existing regional communities; things like PMI chapters do a great job of creating a format for individuals in …

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