Executive Disconnect?

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.

  Communications Management   Strategy  

This month’s executive project management based theme gives me a perfect opportunity to talk about a pet peeve of mine--the apparent communications chasm that exists in so many organizations between project managers and executives. The evidence that this chasm exists is readily available--project managers complaining about disengaged sponsors or that no one seems to care about their project any more. From the executive angle, there are the complaints that they never know what’s really going on, or that the project is focused on the wrong things. It’s all too common, and yet no one ever seems to be able to solve the problem. Why is that?

I’m not going to pretend that I have all of the answers, but in many cases I do think that it is simply a failure to communicate effectively--and that’s what I want to try and address here.

Different focus, different language
To be successful, an organization’s executive team needs to be focused at the strategic level. They have some understanding of what is happening within their organization, but they need to rely on their teams to manage the minutiae while they focus on consolidated information and trends. Additionally, they spend a lot of their working lives looking forward--positioning the organization and their individual departments to take advantage of what is going to be happening several…

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