Practicing Resilience by Example

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.

  Leadership   Talent Management  

I don’t know many people who are sad to see the backside of 2020. It was a year like no other with challenges for all of us that would never have seemed possible at the start of the year. Yet we got through it, not without difficulty and not without a lot of stress. And now 2021 promises to offer different challenges that may well prove to be just as stressful.

The pandemic isn’t behind us, not yet. As I write this, vaccines are being rolled out and optimism is high that at some point in 2021, the pandemic will be beaten—or at least on a downward trajectory. Its legacy will remain for all of us in our personal and professional lives with new ways of working, new ways of interacting with suppliers and customers, and changes to our employer’s goals and strategies.

A lot of those changes are not yet fully understood; they’ll continue to evolve and shift during the course of this year even as the focus moves back to recovery and reinvestment in growth. That’s going to present a lot of challenges for project teams, and in particular for the project managers that lead those teams.

We’re used to projects changing and evolving in normal circumstances, adjustments that are intended to keep the work being done aligned with the business needs the project is expected to meet. In recent years, the amount of change has generally increased. …

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