Job Title Obsolescence?

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.

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Topics: Career Development, Resource Management, Talent Management

I’ve had a couple of conversations recently that have been extremely frustrating to me. One of them was with an individual at a presentation who took issue with my assertion that project managers should be focused on business benefits. He told me that a project manager’s job was simply to deliver the scope of the project on time and budget. He then said the customer took over and “clearly the customer owns all accountability for business benefits.”

The second conversation was with a project manager who was looking to resource a development project and was finding there were no software developers available. She had a technical analyst who was capable of doing the work—but she wasn’t being allowed to use that individual because the technical stakeholder had convinced the sponsor “the analyst wasn’t capable of doing it properly.”

Now I’ll freely admit there may be more going on in both those conversations (especially the second one) than simply an arbitrary interpretation of a job role, and I’ll also recognize that there are scenarios when a title is more than just a title. For example, there may be a title that conveys a formal certification or authority level, or a title may map to specific accountabilities and rights in a collective bargaining agreement.

However, those are outliers in 2016. For most …

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