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June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
Unlearning PM: Who’s Managing Whom?
David Schmaltz is a project manager in Takoma Park, Maryland.
However you might define project control, you should question its purpose before attempting to accomplish it. Otherwise, you may default to a control strategy poorly matched to your intentions and your project’s purpose. There’s considerable evidence that individuals, not managers, PMOs or progress reports, exert the most meaningful control over successful projects, and that external controls compromise this inherent capability.
In part one of this series, I presented findings outlined in The Underlying Theory of Project Management Is Obsolete, a PMI-published paper by Lauri Koskela and Gregory Howell, who identified key theories underlying the PMBOK that inhibit project performance: The Transformational View; Management By Planning and Thermostatic Control. The paper claimed that these three tacit theories in action create “self-inflicted problems” and I proposed that they require unlearning. Part two — “Seeing Different” — considered some inherent limitations of The Transformational View: that while useful for analysis, this perspective trivializes situated work and is difficult to see beyond. Part three, “Don’t Task, Don’t Tell,” evaluated Management By Planning, citing situations where management succeeded by other means. Part four examined the limitations of using Thermostatic Control to resolve “The …
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