Are Project Managers Scared of Innovation?

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.

  Innovation  

This month’s ProjectManagement.com theme is innovation, and when I first started thinking about it I had a lot of ideas going around in my head--innovations that have occurred recently or that are now emerging. However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized how little of this innovation was actually directly associated with project management.

Instead, a lot of it is around associated disciplines--improvements between strategy and execution driving the growth and evolution of portfolio management, for example. That impacts project management for sure, but a project management innovation? Similarly, there has been significant innovation in the project management tool space, as you would expect with advances in technology; but here again, project management is reacting to those changes, not driving them. The most obvious project advancement in recent years has been the growth and expansion of agile, but that is more properly described as project execution rather than project management (I’m pretty sure my agile colleagues wouldn’t take kindly to the suggestion that they undertake project management, per se).

So where does that leave project management? Does it mean we are a discipline that is resistant to innovation and evolution? Are project managers becoming those people who sit in the corner and mutter about how things used to be so much …

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