4 Essential Project Management Super Powers

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  

When I saw that this month’s ProjectManagement.com theme was power skills, I immediately had this vision of some super hero project manager dressed in a fancy costume ready to save the world—one stakeholder at a time.

Okay, maybe that’s just me. But there must be those skills that separate the best of the best when it comes to project management, right? I mean, if not, how come some PMs are better than others, and how come some have an almost flawless track record of success despite sometimes seemingly insurmountable odds?

I don’t think there’s a major movie around the corner starring a super hero project manager, and I don’t think your favorite Hollywood star is currently figuring out how to leap tall dependencies in a single bound. But I do think the premise is sound (of super powers for project managers, not the movie thing). And if that’s the case, what are those skills—and how do the rest of us learn to master them so we too can be the stars in our organization’s success?

It’s got to be beyond the basics
I think the easiest way of exploring what those skills might be is to consider what they’re definitively not. It’s not the basic project management skills that we all learned at the start of our careers. Whether that training was in traditional waterfall techniques or in agile, those …

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