Priorities for the profession?

1. Viewing project management to be a profession is as viewing water to be a drink. As as advocate of project management, I find the perspective that project management is a profession to be a narrow and limiting one. This is in no way a discredit to the importance and value of project management; to the contrary it is exalting it to a higher level, purpose, and calling. I like David H. Curling's writings on the Project Management Profession and I believe he positions project management most accurately. But that's not my point. My point is calling project management a profession tends to limit the applicability, importance, and value of project management to a narrow span of focus and body of practitioners. Much like the way water is a drink, of course, it is also (and more importantly) much more than a drink. Just as water is important for life and has far more purposes than just a drink, so too project management can be viewed this way. But not, if we continue to have a narrow view of project management [only] as a profession.


2. The need for agility in project management. No I am not talking about agile, rather agility. And, the business necessity to have flexibility and speed a key tool for use by management. For example, I recently had a tall dead tree on city property between my fence and my neighbor's fence threatening to fall. Living in Florida and approaching Hurricane season, I desperately wanted to have the tree removed. After months of discussion with city and county officials to confirm who owned the tree and who was actually responsible for assessing its health and determining if it should be removed, I was still facing Hurricane season rapidly approaching with a large dead tree that could easily bring about thousands of dollars of damage. Finally, the city agreed that the tree was theirs and I can't begin to tell you what would be involved to add "cutting this tree down" to the city arborist's project list. With bad weather approaching, I privately contracted to have the tree removed - violating the law and incurring a fairly large expense for this. This is but one very small example of the need for agility and flexibility in a project and project organization context. I am sure you get the idea. Sometimes, it is best to deviate from the best practice. In my opinion, this does not lessen the standard.


3. And lastly, there continues to be somewhat a blind spot for all of that accident and informal project management. These are real people, with real projects, with real needs in the area of tools and right-sized approaches for managing projects and project related work. To continue to call these folks accidental or informal project managers, to suggest that they are not "real" project managers, or to simply ignore their existence is not only incorrect thinking but it is (in my opinion) bad business judgment and intellectually dimwitted. But what has the profession done for these folks? Nothing, besides insist that they do not call themselves project managers. And do these folks have an idea of such groups as APM or PMI or IPMA (not to pick on anyone)..? Of course not. No wonder today's businesses and organizations do such a poor job of project management throughout the nooks and crannies of the organization. If the formal PM bodies do not care, why should anyone else. N' est pas?

Obviously, I am very passionately about project management and at every level within an organization. And, I think the PM organizations have done a fantastic job. Kudos to PMI, APM, and the others. Perhaps my sights are set too high, but I would like to see project management go both very deep (as it has) and traverse very wide (as it has not yet). As always, I put it out there, so I look forward to having it be thrown back in my face. I hope we hear and learn from others.