They Don’t Call It “The Accidental Profession” For Nothin’

 

I have never met a medical doctor who came into the field after having done something different entirely, and then had an epiphany that they needed to learn how to heal people in order to continue with their chosen profession.  Ditto with accountants. But Project Management? It’s chocked full of them (people who suddenly realized they needed to understand PM, not how to heal people or set up a ledger).

Generally speaking, the people in the PM profession whom I’ve encountered got there in one of two ways: either they quickly grasped concepts such as Critical Path or Earned Value methodologies, and realized that there was a demand for such talent; or else they were doing something else entirely – usually some sort of engineering – and were put into a position of authority on some project work, and realized they were sorely lacking the skill set that would enable them to bring that work to a successful conclusion.  ProjectManagement.com (and, by extension, the whole Project Management Institute®) is useful for the professionals in the former category; but absolutely essential for those in the latter. What professional, handed a project assignment but realizing they need a higher level of expertise to accomplish the tasks at hand, has time to suspend work, and attend classes at a university?

Hence PM’s nickname as “the accidental profession.” It’s also interesting to note some of the adjunct versions of PM, and how different they are from our friends, the accountants. Ever heard of “Agile Accounting?” No? How about “Scrum Financing?” Still nothing? Well, there’s a reason for that.

Project Management’s ability to adapt to new and different circumstances is one of its reasons for existence. Before common access to management information tools such as Critical Path or Earned Value, managers who were responsible for actual project work lacked the information tools needed to ensure successful project delivery. As I’ve often asserted on this blog, the top 80^th percentile managers who have access to 20% of the information they need to obviate a given decision will be consistently out-performed by the 20% worst managers who have access to 80% of the information so needed. But, since the Asset Managers dominated the field of business theory, the early project managers were at a distinct disadvantage. To seek an estimate of at-completion costs was to be presented with a projection based on the burn rate of the actual costs. A cost variance was the difference between the budget and the (again) actual costs. What’s the estimated completion date? Well, the management experts – at the time, accountants – were sure it had something to do with actual costs, or lists of milestones, or something like that.

Naturally, when better methods for providing the unique set of information that PMs needed became available, the existing management science gurus reacted the same way scientists have for centuries, when a new theory is proposed that is clearly better than the existing ones: they fought it with everything they had. The world’s first business school started in 1819, in Paris,[i] by which time the particulars of accounting had already been in existence for centuries (literally). PMI® didn’t start until 1969, when the field was still relatively new.  That’s 150 years exactly, 150 years of a specific set of management practices that had little formal recognition from the management sciences establishment. And yet, there is a distinct possibility that a Kuhnsian-type paradigm shift is emerging in business, whereby Project Management theory either is or will soon displace much of what passes for commonly-accepted precepts in the management sciences. These PM usurpers are not being forced on anybody – they’re being embraced out of discovered necessity, almost, well, accidentally.

In essence, while most of us may have swerved into the project management realm relatively accidentally, that its set of management science precepts should come to claim major areas of business practice is no accident.

It is, in fact, inevitable.

[i] Business school. (2016, March 5). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 03:02, April 10, 2016, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Business_school&oldid=708373426