The Things They Never Told You

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.

  Career Development   Governance   New Practitioners  

The January topic at ProjectManagement.com is new practitioners. That got me thinking back to all the things I wanted to know when I first started as a PM but had to figure out for myself.

Unfortunately, I’m old, and my memory isn’t that good…so I didn’t get very far! Instead I spoke to a number of people in my network who are relatively new to project management and asked them what it was they felt least prepared for when they first started managing projects.

They had been given the training and they generally had been given some kind of experience as a work package leader or similar, but they still experienced a number of “gotchas!” In this article, I want to look at some of their more common responses and offer some thoughts that I hope will help other new PMs facing these challenges.

No one else cares about your details
Let’s start with this one and get some of the more depressing stuff out of the way first. No one gets into project management for the fame and adulation, but there is an expectation the role will get at least some attention from the individuals in leadership positions who initiated the project in the first place.

The simple fact is they are generally concerned with only one thing: Will the project deliver what it’s supposed to, when it’s supposed …

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