PM Skills: Shades of Grey

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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Few things on a project are clear cut. There is never absolute certainty as to the exact outcome, about how long the journey will take us to get to where we want to be, or how much that journey is going to cost us. So we work with and within variance; variance from budget, from scope or from schedule. And out of the process of reconciling those three elements emerges the shape of our project--a reassuringly familiar triangle, the platonic template of all our projects. But like a snowflake, each project is characteristically unique in the elements of its own creation. And that uniqueness creates the need for a specialist set of skills that we call project management.

The fifth edition of A Guide to the Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK) asserts that,:

“Although repetitive elements may be present in some project deliverables and activities, this repetition does not change the fundamental, unique characteristics of the project.”

If uniqueness is the mutable metal of our projects, then repetitiveness is the forge on which we temper those specialist skills that give it shape. But what kind of repetitiveness tempers those skills? And how long does it take to temper them?

Mastering the cognitively complex
Whichever field of endeavor we pursue, acquiring the requisite skills to gain admittance is always attained through repetition. It’s …

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