Why You Need to Be Opinionated

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   Communications Management  

When I first started my own business, I told myself that I wanted to stand for something. I didn’t want to be one of those project managers who applied for every contract and succeeded simply by playing the odds. That wouldn’t give me the control I wanted over the work I would be doing, and it wouldn’t feel like I was being true to myself or to my clients.

I always had opinions, and I had never been shy in sharing them. So I took it a step further and started sharing my opinions on project management on the website that I had back then. And I started writing for the site that became ProjectManagement.com.

At the time it felt like a gamble—that having opinions would make me stand out in a positive way to some clients whose ideas and beliefs aligned with my own, but it would also mean that several opportunities were closed off to me because clients just didn’t see things the way that I did. In reality, it wasn’t a gamble at all. As one of my first clients told me, “If we had wanted someone who thought the same as us, we wouldn’t have looked for a consultant. And at least we know that you’ll tell us what you think.”

Fast forward to today, and I think the same thing applies. In fact, in today’s social media-rich environment, there are far more opportunities for project managers to stand for something, to …

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