Who’s Managing the Changes in 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.

  Change Management   Portfolio Management   Strategy  

If you have been in the project management field for more than a few years, you know there is a lot of change happening. It seems to me that virtually every element of project management is evolving at a rapid rate--agile approaches are driving change into even the most traditional of organizations, portfolio management and strategic alignment is creating new expectations around the skills that PMs need, and of course the rate of technological change is creating significant shifts in tools and tracking.

I believe that project managers are pretty adaptable people as a group, but this level of change is unprecedented. In order to try and ensure that the changes are implemented in a way that maximizes the chances of success while minimizing the disruption on the projects being managed, it needs to be managed. At the same time, care needs to be taken to ensure that project managers remain motivated and engaged. That’s what I want to explore in this article.

Project managers are human, too
Organizations are getting much better at recognizing that projects are disruptive. Over the last decade or so, the concern for project team members has increased dramatically and there is now recognition that success on future initiatives is as much to do with team member engagement and motivation as it is with solid plans.

However, that same level of recognition hasn’…

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