Stop Asking, Start Telling

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   Stakeholder Management  

I don’t like the idea of New Year’s resolutions. That leaves me in a bit of a spot with ProjectManagement.com’s entire theme dedicated to PM resolutions this month, but we’ll not tell the editor my thoughts on the topic. The reason I don’t like the idea is that it seems to me that if something needs changing, it should just be changed, we don’t need to wait until an arbitrary turning of the calendar to make an adjustment.

But I will admit that a new year presents an opportunity to review what’s working as well as what needs some improvement—and then to commit to making some adjustments. So, with that in mind, I thought about what it was that I didn’t like about project management at the moment. And that led me to the theme of this article: Project managers aren’t assertive enough.

Yes, that’s a sweeping generalization, but that’s inevitable when writing about an entire profession—and this is something that I see in a lot of project managers, so I think it’s worth exploring.

Today’s project environment
Let’s start by understanding the role projects play in delivering work today. In the not-too-distant past, projects were an exception. Stable operations represented the vast majority of money and effort invested by an organization, and projects were a relatively small …

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