Project Management Perspectives

When I consider many PM detractors I have encountered over the year, much of the issue revolves around people's perceptions of control. After all, management revolves around feedback and control as a means to predictable outcomes. I distinctly remember being the PM at a idea generation workshop where some participants insisted that the #1 impediment to efficiency was managers (both functional and project).

PMs typically come from a separate organization so we are not viewed as "one of us". We analyze situations and point out the issues that need fixing, which can be perceived as making others look bad. We need everyone working to the same plan so we remove autonomy from groups to achieve an integrated solution. In management circles, there is often a culture of taking credit for the successes of the team, and some managers see PMs as lessening the credit they should receive.

Some of these perceptions I just brush off as general psychology, but I always try to promote the value of PM. I will take on battles with leadership sometimes, specifically to show I have my team's back. I try to explain that I'm not being critical to detract from their plans, but rather helping to improve it. I try to recognize the successes of the team and give credit where it is due.

Some people are happier when they're complaining however, so I have to accept that I'm not going to be everyone's best friend, and that's the nature of the business too.

Any confident group benefits from exploring its boundaries, listening to 'nay-sayers' and provocative agents. I often use the tactics of providing different and even controversial arguments to the mainline of thinking. From time to time it opens the way to make changes to the profession (or not).

In some domains projects themselves have become far less important than they were in the past. Most work in the field of software and data for example gets done outside of projects and "project thinking" is often understood to be an anti-pattern because it implies that non-project work can't effect change or that the organisation is insufficiently agile or productive enough unless people are rallied around a project. This can't be a valid argument in all industries but it does make a lot of sense in many modern organisations, particularly digital businesses.

Hi George,

The "project thinking" problem I refer to has very little to do with the details of how work is managed. It has more to do with an organisation's strategy for change and continuous improvement.

If, as is the case in many organisations, your technology and change teams are rolling out new and improved products and enhancing their value every single day then even major improvements can be done without starting up anything called a project.

If it is clear that a different management style or working practice is useful to deliver some outcome then a sufficiently adaptive organisation can make such improvements (choose their WoW) without playing the "project" card. Of course the people managing continuous improvement and DevOps may have the same skills as project managers; they might be former project managers, but they are no longer dealing with projects and so they aren't usually called PMs.