Do You Really Know What You Think You Know?

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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As most of you will be aware, ProjectManagement.com recently launched a new feature called PMWars--a 90-second “battle” against another member based on PM-related trivia. Since it launched, I have been challenged to a number of wars (feel free to keep them coming), and while it is undoubtedly a lot of fun, it also made me stop and think about a few things. It’s been a long time since I took my PMP exam, and while I still teach a number of PM-related topics (and of course still work within the industry), there are inevitably some knowledge areas of PMBOK that I am less familiar with than others. Well, when you have to suddenly answer questions on those areas with a very visible clock counting down in front of you (as is the case with PMWars), it can be a humbling experience!

In this article, I want to look at how each of us can recognize those areas of our knowledge that are stagnating and what we can do to try and avoid losing that knowledge altogether--personal refresher training, if you will.

The need for broad knowledge
Before I start looking in more detail at what we can do to maintain our broad knowledge base, I want to consider why it’s important to maintain that breadth of knowledge. Some would argue that if you aren’t using a particular category of knowledge at the moment then it doesn’t matter whether you maintain it--if…

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