The Insurgent Strategy

David Schmaltz is a project manager in Takoma Park, Maryland.

  Career Development   Innovation   New Practitioners   ProjectsAtWork  

Processes are merely metastasized intentions. To get many projects done, we judiciously work around executive oversight. We work the system so the system can work. And this reality, often unspoken, also applies to convening a PM training workshop that goes beyond passively memorizing someone else’s technical knowledge.

After the sixth lunch with the executive, I finally began understanding: He couldn’t understand.

I might have figured this out earlier in our relationship, but I naively thought that I might successfully explain. In retrospect, this expectation clearly qualified as delusional. Though he’d been working around projects for three decades, the bulk of his experience had been as an executive overseer. I was talking boots on the ground.

He appreciated my stories, but found them fantastic; as in unactionable. If, as I contended, process and method had historically proven ineffective in improving project experience, he wondered what processes and methods I proposed to replace them. He lived in a world completely defined by stuff that, in my experience, defined only a notional world. He suspected the same about me.

In the real world, who you are seems to matter most. What you believe, and the ability to catch yourself believing and, in that moment, question your belief — these seemed more defining. He could recognize this principle in …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.