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Moving from Mainstream to Flexible Management
Doug is the author of the landmark book, Extreme Project Management®: Using Leadership, Principles and Tools to Deliver Value in the Face of Volatility. He works with clients who undertake projects in very demanding environments: those settings that feature high speed, high change, high unpredictability and high stress. Doug has lived in the trenches—from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania to Beijing, China—with over 275 project teams with budgets that ranged from $25,000 to over $25 million. He is one of the founders of the Agile Leadership Network, an organization dedicated to connecting, developing and supporting great project leaders. He is known for his hard-hitting and humorous keynote speeches that address vital issues facing today’s project-based organizations. You can visit Doug at www.dougdecarlo.com.
Recently I came across Preston Smith’s new book, Flexible Product Development. Although the book is ostensibly about product development in general, it has significant implications for IT project management and software development in particular.
Smith offers a number of useful points of contrast that spotlight some fundamental differences between mainstream and flexible project management. In so doing, he emphasizes that his purpose is not to downplay mainstream project management, but rather to sensitize readers to the differences so that they will understand adjustments needed as they require more flexibility.
In this article, which is based on Chapter 8 entitled “Project Management,” I’ll be using the chapter’s summary as a framework for bringing forth some of the key insights that Preston Smith offers us. But first, a few introductory points.
Smith gets to the bottom of it all when he succinctly states, “The root contrast [between flexible and mainstream project management] is the implicit view of change.” More specifically, the mainstream worldview craves predictability. It is therefore thought that if you do enough research (e.g., requirements analysis), you can iron out the uncertainty, or a lot of it. This can give stakeholders a false expectation as to the accuracy of the plan. In the worse case, …
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