Bring Your Own Style: The Importance of PM Personality

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  

I have long said that project management was more art than science. There are rarely exact and precise outcomes no matter how many decimal places we try to get our estimates to.

Success doesn’t come from a step-by-step following of a highly detailed plan; it comes from effective collaboration among a group of people who agree to work together and put the needs of the business and team ahead of their own individual needs. And projects frequently succeed because of the efforts of those team members and the PM, not because every step in every process was followed to the letter. In fact, quite often, they succeed despite those processes.

All of which goes to say that people make the difference in delivering successful projects. And the project manager is the most critical person of all in that environment. It’s therefore important for project managers to develop their PM personality as early as possible in their careers. They need to be someone that the team wants to rally round, someone who is trusted to lead the team through the inevitable challenges.

In short, they need to be a unique individual.

The importance of personality
Project environments vary considerably. There are highly regulated organizations that require hugely detailed project plans with significant audit trails of every step, every decision and every action. Then there are highly adaptive…

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