Can We Enable Diversity and Inclusion From a Business Perspective?

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.

  Organizational Culture   Organizational Project Management   Strategy  

I believe that one of the most important evolutions in project management over the last few years has been the greater involvement of project teams in determining what exactly they are delivering to their clients. That started with agile and the idea that solutions would progressively elaborate based on customer feedback, but it’s now common for all types of delivery with a recognition that in order to optimize the value a solution can deliver to the business, it may need to evolve from the original specifications.

In order to facilitate this, project managers and teams have had to develop a greater understanding of how the products, services, systems and processes they deliver are leveraged by business teams in order to achieve value goals. It naturally follows that as the way those solutions are used evolves, so the teams need to adjust their understanding so that they can continue to produce relevant deliverables. That’s particularly true when it comes to customer-facing products and services—if the solutions don’t align with customer expectations, then the goals simply won’t be achieved.

Which brings us to diversity and inclusion. Organizations are increasingly recognizing that not only is offering more diverse and inclusive products and services the right thing to do from a societal perspective, it’s also the right thing to do from…

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