Navigating Change and Adversity

George Freeman, PMP, is a seasoned IT project manager and leader who has worked in the software industry for nearly four decades, including over 25 years of project management. He has significant experience and expertise in enterprise information systems, data, and business architectures, and is an advocate for “business and technical architectural awareness” among all project team members. Mr. Freeman has international and remote team experience, and has a passion for meta-modeling, domain-driven design, and “all things architecture.”

  Career Development   Change Management  

As calendars flip to a new year, we often ponder and then undertake resolutions to improve ourselves based on our previous years of experiences. However, for many of us, the norm-breaking chaos of 2020 has changed our perception of this time-honored opportunity for self-improvement.

Stated differently, we may view resolutions as inconsequential in light of this journey or, conversely, view them as mission-critical. In this season of change and adversity, where do you fall in this spectrum of thought and review?

Evaluations such as this provide insight into the emotional impact this season has had on our psyche, which we may not have noticed otherwise. After all, we are project professionals, and we “eat change” for breakfast, lunch and dinner—and enjoy a dish of adversity for desert (or so we think).

Setting aside our postured exteriors, the last year and current-state realities have been a wake-up call for us all, so let’s bring this impact into the open and leverage the knowledge gained for our benefit and that of our teams.

The quality of self-awareness
As a general rule, project professionals tend to jettison personal evaluations ascribed to the emotional spectrum. That is, our default nature is to put our heads down when change and adversity strike, respond to events as they arise, and manage the current plan to success.

But let me …

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