What Does Results-Focused Management Really Mean? (Part 1)

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.

  Governance   Strategy  

I hope that “results-focused project management” doesn’t become one of those buzzword terms that causes everyone to roll their eyes, but it’s starting to get that kind of exposure. It’s a tremendously important concept and one that has been written about fairly extensively in recent years. Up to this point though, the focus has been on helping organizations to understand the concept--messaging focused on executives and PMOs. That needs to continue because the concepts are still developing and evolving, but we also need to ensure that project managers understand the impact for them--and that’s what I want to talk about here.

This is a complex issue, so I am going to take two articles to cover it--starting here with the foundational work on relationships and skills, and then talking about team and task management in the next article.

Let’s start in the obvious spot and provide a basic definition of results-focused project management, at least from a project manager’s perspective. In its simplest form, it’s about managing projects with a view to ensuring that the business results that the project is being executed to achieve are actually met. In other words, instead of managing to the traditional project constraints of time, scope, cost, risk and quality, we are prepared to compromise some (or all) of those if it allows …

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