Be the Change

 

I was reading the Voices on Project Management blog earlier today written by Jim De Piante and he seems to lament, "I have a feeling the nature of project management—which has sustained my career for more than 20 years—is changing radically."

He describes the forces that led him into a project management career in the late 1980s and suggests that "tectonic shifts" in the business climate made project management an obvious career choice back then. However, "Now, I see three things happening that give me pause," he says. "they're clearly things I need to react to, but unlike last time, I don't know how."

1. "Lower-level IT jobs continue to go to emerging markets." Unless you've lived in a cave or a shack in Montana for the last few years, you already know this. Of course this is challenging from a project management perspective—managing remote teams can sometimes be problematic. However, it is being done by skilled and capable project managers all over the world with software that accommodates it. That being said, don't assume that it's only "lower-level" knowledge work going overseas either, it's not. I know of organizations who work "round-the-clock" with needs identified in China being assigned to project managers in Poland who in turn assign teams in other parts of Europe and the US to work on projects 24/7. As project leaders, we need to do more (a lot more) than build a WBS and assign tasks to team members. We need to create an atmosphere where creativity can thrive and project teams can invent and create, making our teams and ourselves indispensable—or we will become irrelevant and replaceable.
2. "The way project work gets done, particularly in the IT industry, seems to be undergoing an important shift." De Piante is referring to how more and more organizations are turning to Agile methods and how even the PMI is now offering an Agile certification. I can't tell whether he's lamenting it or not, but I do know that much of the governance overhead of traditional project management methods is too cumbersome for most projects, the failure rate of projects according to sources like the Standish Group's Chaos Survey are far too high and the PMO failure rate is bad enough that if you're organization is starting a PMO and you flip a coin, you have about the same odds of winning as your new PMO has of success in the first 18 months. We need to be more flexible in how we manage projects. Plugging everything into the same model just doesn't work. We need to use the right methods for the right projects, and for many projects that's an Agile approach. That being said, I don't think there's one silver bullet for everything—we should embrace any method that enables us to accomplish our objectives in the simplest way possible (sometimes that might be even be a "to do" list).
3. "We keep hearing of a new normal." If the current economic crisis has taught us nothing else, it has taught us that business as usual isn't anymore. Your CEO doesn't care about your project plan, he or she cares about the value those projects produce for his or her organization. The "new normal" (if there really is such a thing) is that we need to make sure that everything we do is providing some kind of value to our organization and that we aren't doing anything that doesn't provide value. Now that doesn't mean that process isn't important or that governance is inconsequential. It does mean that process for the sake of process or unnecessary requirements should be eliminated. "Any idiot can make things more complicated," said Einstein, "it takes real genius to make things simple." Our focus should be on keeping the process as simple and un-encumbering as possible. "As possible" are the operative words. Whether you call it the "new normal" or not is up to you. In my opinion, it should have been our focus all along—and has been the focus of the most successful project managers I know.

"To me, these three things spell change," writes De Piante, "and it seems to me I ought to be making some changes as well, but I'm not sure what they are yet."

Project management is changing. What we call projects is being redefined by the market, how we manage teams (people) is changing, what is expected of projects and project leaders is changing and if we don't change the way WE look at these things, we will become irrelevant.

Ghandi said, "Be the change that you want to see in the world." If we want to survive with our profession in the future, we need to be the change—or someone else will.