How Do You Prepare PMs for an Adaptive World?

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.

  New Practitioners   Talent Management  

A customer I have been working with for many years recently approached me with concerns over how they were developing new project managers. This was a bit of a surprise, as they had been very successful at that in the past—and a number of PMs I know who have gone on to lead massive initiatives started their career with this company.

This customer had recently embraced a more adaptive form of project delivery. All of their PMs were trained in both agile and waterfall methods, and those project managers were now being allowed to combine various traditional and agile techniques into a hybrid approach that was unique to each project and manager. They still had to operate within parameters defined by the PMO around reporting, approvals, etc., but there was quite a lot of freedom for PMs within those parameters.

This approach was working well for the customer, and they were fully committed to maintaining and extending it as the organization continued to pursue digital transformation initiatives and become even more focused on becoming a project-driven organization. But the concern was that with this increasingly flexible way of working for PMs, it was difficult to bring new PMs into the fold.

Historically, the organization had trained new PMs on both agile and waterfall methods; provided them with opportunities to lead initiatives in both categories; be mentored by …

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