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Survival Guide for the Public Sector PM
George Jucan is an experienced Project Manager Professional (PMP) with 20 years of technical and management experience in complex environments, both in public and private sector. He is well known in the project management community as a successful IT project management consultant, speaker at public events, trainer and author of project management articles.
Multiple articles on gantthead clearly showed that projects in public sector are significantly different from those in the private sector, so I will not debate this topic again. This is so obvious that even PMI, which does not lightly accept extensions to PMBOK (there is none for IT/IS, for example), chartered a Government Extension to the PMBOK Guide--now at second edition.
Reading the aforementioned articles, a project manager might fall in despair: it seems to be no way to actually drive a project to success in such an environment, where governance nightmares and funding issues are the norm. In the last 10 years I’ve spent most of my time in government projects as an independent consultant, which makes things worse because you’re an “outsider” as well. Along the way I’ve learned some hard lessons that I tried to summarize in the following words of advice.
Definition of “project success”: In the public sector, a project is considered successful if it delivers value to the public: if it contributes to the agenda set forth by elected officials. All other considerations take a second stage to this, including timely completion, not exceeding the budget or even delivering full scope. If the “priorities” from the top change, they must be followed--even if this requires significant throwaway and rework. Even …
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