There used to be a (highly misogynistic) TV advertisement for Virginia Slims cigarettes, which rather exploited the ‘women’s liberation’ movement to advertise a harmful product. It’s theme was “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby”, and ostensibly gave women their own cigarette, which they have somehow ‘earned’.
Thankfully, this post isn’t about that advert but I couldn’t help myself from using it for the title – with a twist. Not a ‘long way, baby’, but a ‘long way babushka’.
What’s a babushka? Many of us know this as a “Russian nesting doll” or ‘matryoshka’. (матрёшка). It’s a set of wooden dolls of decreasing size placed one inside another. And it should evoke the idea of the fact that everything is a system – and everything is part of a system.
Now let’s shift from cigarettes and wooden dolls to: systems.
The second chapter in the PMBOK® Guide, 7th Edition, is entitled, “A System for Value Delivery”. It says, in part, “projects exist within a larger system, such as a governmental agency, organization, or contractual arrangement….Organizations create value for stakeholders.”
It goes on to say that “components such as portfolios, programs, projects, products and operations that can be used individually or collectively to create value”.
So projects are part of a system – and as you know, projects are made up of work, and tasks, and milestones, and systems to describe who does what (RACI matrices), how work is organized (WBS), scheduled (Gantt Chart), and those may be part of a project information management system (PMIS), which in turn is part of a larger information management system… and that may now be aided by AI agents, which requires that project managers get educated and certified, as part of an educational system…are you beginning to see babushkas? I am. They’re all around me. And they’re IN me because I am a system – a system of systems.
This has been the foundation for me in teaching a suite of graduate-level project management courses, and was a real boost for me for course that I had already written called Project Value Strategies. In this post, I’d like to discuss the key word in that PMBOK® Guide chapter: System.
More and more as I research and discuss what differentiates a project leader from a project manager, I think a big element of that distinction is whether or not they sense, see, feel, hear, appreciate the bigger picture of where there project fits in the larger scheme of things. That “picture’ is the system, and it’s a lot like the idea of the babushka doll.
I have been now ‘hooked’ on the idea of systems thinking as a way to improve how project managers can become more successful – and become project leaders. I will likely end up with a series of posts on this topic, with this being only an introductory one.
To that end, project leaders, I invite you to watch this video. Consider it an eye-opener as it was for me.
What you can expect in the next posts will be an expansion of that video and a strengthened connection between it and project value delivery.
