Is There Still a Role for Project Specialists?

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  

If you read my articles regularly, then you know my views on the future of project management. You will have read many pieces where I focus on the need for project managers to demonstrate business skills in order to ensure projects are able to deliver solutions that can succeed in terms of the required business outcomes.

But the reason I focus on that so much is that it is one of the newer trends in project management. That doesn’t mean that other aspects of the project management Talent Triangle aren’t important.

Leadership has been, is, and always will be one of the most critical skill sets a project manager can have. Many flawed project scopes, schedules and budgets have been saved by strong leadership, and many people are involved in projects today because of experiences they had working for exceptional leaders early in their careers. I include myself among those people.

Technical project management skills also remain important, and while many aspects of these skills can be automated with modern project management software, there is still a need for people to understand those disciplines and recognize when the software hasn’t got it quite right. It’s these technical skills I want to focus on in this article, in particular on people who specialize in one or more of these skills.

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