How Much Knowledge is Enough for a PM?

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Knowledge Management   Lessons Learned  

I had an interesting discussion with a couple of colleagues recently about the way that project management has evolved since we have been in the profession. We covered a lot of ground, but one of the topics that came up was how the management of work had changed--particularly when it came to controlling that work.

When I first started managing projects, work allocation was a very prescriptive process--the PM assigned tasks to team members and tracked progress of that work in the schedule. That provided PMs with a lot of knowledge around what was happening on the project--at any point in time, he or she knew what every team member was doing.

Our entire project reporting and tracking was based around having that knowledge--we got weekly updates on progress and then compiled status reports that presented that data, along with explanations of variances, top risks and issues, etc. The PM was able to put these reports together in a relatively straightforward manner because they had all of that knowledge at their fingertips--they were the hub of all activity. These days, things are rather different.

In most projects today, the PM has less direct control over work allocation and tracking. Agile is an obvious example where teams are self-managed, but even in more traditional project execution approaches, there is a lot more autonomy with teams. There is recognition that …

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