Identifying and Unlocking PM Potential

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.

  Talent Management  

Long-term management of people has a number of elements to it, but we can probably distill it down into a couple of categories: managing performance and managing potential. Most organizations are good at the first, but perhaps not so good at the second.

As project managers, the same is probably also true--we are probably better at managing the short-term performance of our team members than we are trying to unlock their long-term potential. In this article, I want to focus on project managers in particular and how organizations can find, keep and develop high-potential PMs. However, many of the concepts can be applied just as well to project team members.

Defining potential
Before we can discuss how we identify someone’s potential, we have to first define what we mean by the term. In particular for project managers, potential for what? Are we looking for people who show signs of being high-performing PMs, or are we looking for something more? If it is more than project management, what is it? The specifics will vary somewhat from one organization to the next, but we can draw some broad parameters.

In order to define potential for project managers, we need to consider the possible paths that their careers might take. Obviously that leads us to look for a high level of pure project management skills, but it also requires us to look for people who have the ability …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.