Resilience: A PM's New Must Have

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   Leadership  

Let me share with you my thought process for approaching ProjectManagement.com recent theme of “resilience.” I immediately thought it was a great way to start 2021. After what we’ve all been through over the last 12 months, we’ve all found ourselves to be more resilient than we thought—we have had to be.

Then I started thinking about resilience as it applies to project management, and it seemed like something that employers would be seeking out. After all, project environments are extremely stressful right now as projects feel the pressure to deliver critical initiatives that may determine the very survival of organizations.

I looked back at my notes from conversations with a number of clients over the last couple of months and found that I had actually used the word “resilient” a few times when working with them on their needs for the coming year. “Perfect,” I thought. “I have my first article—writing about how resilience is the new must-have skill for PMs.”

But then I ran into a bit of a problem. What exactly does it mean to be a resilient PM? It’s easy to understand what it means to be a good communicator, and even being a good leader is fairly well understood, if a bit vague. But what makes one project manager more or less resilient than another?

I turned to Google, looking for my …

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