Flawed Reasons for Avoiding Project Management
From the Voices on Project Management Blog
by Cameron McGaughy,
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Date
Implementing the information systems needed to sustain a project management capability will often meet with resistance from within the organization. And much of this resistance can be rather fierce.
For now, I want to discuss the most commonly used objections I've heard over 20 years of work. These actually come from those opposed to doing project management, and my intention is to assess whether or not there arguments are reasonable. I'll concentrate on two in this post and then pick up the other three in my next.
Objection #5: "Project management systems, like earned value (EV) or critical path, don't apply to this kind of work."
These arguments occasionally have merit, especially in organizations that have experienced attempts to impose project management information systems on non-project work.
However, if the work has three or more of the following characteristics, then you do have a project:
-If has discernible beginning and end dates
-It has a service or product that is delivered
-Resources are dedicated to it
-One person or organizational element is responsible for the work's completion
There is no doubt that some unconventional project work will need adaptations from classic EV and critical path management systems. But to assert that project management has no place in managing the work is an excuse and should be left to personnel who are not involved in management decisions.
Objection #4: "EV and critical path are too difficult and expensive to implement."
Again there's enough credibility in this argument to provide a fig leaf of cover to project management antagonists. But a closer look utterly destroys the assertion.
There are two aspects to project management information systems: They provide a valuable information stream on cost and schedule performance and they provide an audit trail for the customer in the event the project goes badly.
It's this second aspect that makes these systems labyrinthine. The performance information stream, when simplified, is actually very easy and cheap to install. But as is so often the cases, when "experts" get together to document the "proper" way these systems should be implemented, the requirements quickly get out of hand.
The audit trail aspects of EV and critical path can be overemphasized to the point that their ability to provide needed management information is eclipsed. However, I must emphasize that simple EV and CPM systems, when freed of their audit trail baggage, are cheap and easy to install--and even the simple systems can provide very powerful management information.
Posted
by
Michael Hatfield
on: December 04, 2009 12:07 PM |
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