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The Rime of the Ancient Project Manager
Ian Whittingham, PMP is director of Calixo Consulting, providing project and program management expertise from initiation through to implementation, covering business transformation, workflow process re-engineering, and enterprise data integration. He is a regular contributor to ProjectManagement.com. You may contact Ian directly at [email protected].
Mixing his metaphors, I still remember his parting words as we finished our conversation: “I wouldn’t touch that project with a barge pole. It’s a real albatross.” He didn’t need to say any more; I knew my Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the awful fate that befell the ancient mariner. His message was clear--if it didn’t kill you, this project would drive you crazy.
By today’s standards, the horrors that the ancient mariner endures in Coleridge’s famous poem are melodramatically quaint. A sailor shoots an albatross and is consequently punished for his crime in a series of supernatural events. Eerie creatures stalk the ship (Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs / Upon the slimy sea); his fellow mariners die then come back to zombie-like life (They raised their limbs like lifeless tools-- / We were a ghastly crew) and sail the ship back to safe harbor.
There are no chainsaw-wielding, ski-masked psychopaths or blade-gloved ghouls. None of the carefully choreographed, maniacal mayhem that usually has us jumping out of our seat--if not our skin. But the one thing everyone remembers from Coleridge’s poem is the killing of the albatross and the mariner’s consequent punishment, symbolized by the hanging of the dead bird around his neck. There it remains, weighing him down, a magnet for all manner of bad luck, a …
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"I'm sick and tired of hearing things from uptight, short-sighted, narrow-minded hypocrites. All I want is the truth. Just gimme some truth." - John Lennon |