The Fortune Cookie Wisdom Guide to Project Management (Part 1)

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].

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There are very few things on which project managers can agree, unanimously. You will always hear at least one dissenting voice taking a contrary view to the majority opinion. But in my experience--at least judging by the evidence of how they go about managing their projects--there is one guiding principle that appears to inform the behavior of all project managers. And that is: they do not like leaving anything to chance.

Bitter experience teaches us that hazard wreaks havoc. So, by instinct or training, we plan and act to purge uncertainty from our projects. In fact, what we call project management--those collections of tools, techniques and processes we use to manage our projects--is mostly defined by this need: the overriding imperative to replace uncertainty with predictability.

But despite the rationality of our project management methodologies, no matter how diligent we are in performing risk analysis (taking all necessary steps to manage those risks), no project is ever entirely immune from chance occurrence—no matter how trivial that occurrence might be—reminding us of how contingent our control over a project really is.

As a group, project managers are no more (nor less) superstitious than the rest of the general populace. We’re just people, like everyone else. Some of us are even willing to acknowledge our own quirks and preferences …

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