When Can PMs Start Breaking the Rules?

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.

  New Practitioners  

A recently trained project manager asked me, “When can I start breaking the rules?” When I asked them what they meant, they explained that they had been sent on a foundational project management training course and taught all the basics about estimates, dependencies, plan building and the like, and had been told by the trainer that these approaches would help them to succeed in their projects.

But when they had started applying those approaches with the team on their first project, there had been pushback. The PM had been told “that wasn’t how things were done,” that other PMs did things differently. When this individual spoke to more experienced PMs about it, they were told that the “training course stuff” didn’t work in the real world and they had to learn to adapt.

That led to their question: When could they start changing their approach? When could they start breaking the training course rules? There are a few issues that we could explore here, but let’s focus on the specific question: When is it okay for a new PM to modify their approach from the standards that they have been taught?

One size doesn’t fit all (or any)
The problem with project management theoretical best practices—any of them (agile, waterfall, whatever)—is that they are trying to provide a one-size-fits-all, best-fit approach …

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