New Ways To Give Back

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  

Philanthropy and giving back has been a staple of project management for as long as I have been in the profession. That’s something we should all be proud of; it’s not a “selfish” discipline, and PMs are frequently role models for everything that is good in our society.

But after the changes that the world—and project managers—have experienced since the start of the pandemic, I think there are opportunities to give back in new ways, and the people who have leveraged project managers for philanthropic efforts in the past may not realize that our skillsets have expanded.

What is a project manager?
To illustrate my point, consider this simple question: What is a project manager?

Chances are that most of you reading this article are PMs, so it’s an easy question to answer. Even those of you that don’t have a project manager title likely work closely with PMs, so will have similar responses.

But what about the people who organize volunteer efforts that sometimes rely on project managers to assist them? I’m not sure they would have the same answer.

In many cases, their response will be out of date. It will be focused on the core skills of a PM and reflect what we would consider our role from five or even 10 years ago. That’s simply because they are often not as closely involved with project managers other …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.