A True View

Ty is a work management evangelist; "accidental" project manager and marketing veteran with over 25 years of experience.

  Communications Management   ProjectsAtWork  

As project and portfolio management processes spread throughout organizations, the greatest roadblock to executive visibility isn’t the software or methodologies employed. It’s individual contributors. Traditional top-down approaches just don’t work. Here are keys to increasing team member participation. Increased visibility and value will follow.

Most of the methodologies we use to manage work today are the result of lessons learned during the early days of the industrial age. Although the assembly line may be a great example of how to efficiently and cost effectively build a car, I wonder if it’s a good model for what we would call knowledge work — the type of work many organizations are engaged in on a daily basis.

What’s more, the roots of the Project Management Institute are in the construction industry and aerospace. While the manufacturing and construction industries are great examples of automating repetitive processes (which may be part of the work done in many organizations turning to project-based work to increase efficiency), projects in general are unwieldy, risky things that can’t be categorized as “business as usual.” Otherwise, they wouldn’t be called projects in the first place.

The search for a better way to get projects and other work done also leads us to a better way to achieve true visibility, validate …

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