Virtually Adapting to Significant Career Change

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   Talent Management  

I was talking to a group of project managers the other day who worked for a company that is still 100% virtual in how it operates (at least for project roles). The PMs seemed happy with how the organization, their teams, and they themselves had been able to adapt to the move to remote. They seemed focused on not just maintaining previous levels of performance, but also looking for ways to leverage the distributed work environment to improve how projects were delivered.

There was no doubt that this group was a great example of how effective the transition to remote working could be, but as a group there was one particular concern that they wanted to try and address. Because they had been able to continue delivering projects successfully throughout the disruption caused by the pandemic, these project managers were now being viewed as even more valuable to the organization than they were before. The organization had always been committed to making project management as effective as possible, but in the past, PMs had been seen as limited to project-related roles.

That was now changing as the leadership qualities of the organization’s project managers were being better appreciated—the ability of PMs to keep their teams motivated and focused was being recognized as something that would benefit the organization in a number of different roles. This was clearly a …

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