Dear Jorge,
I doubt you will find any serious or credible articles arguing against project management. That would be akin to arguing against people management, or customer management, or financial management, etc. As I learned the other day watching a painting showing on TV, even something as seemingly (to the untrained artist) unstructured, creative, and extemporaneous as painting a picture is performed by an experienced artisan following prescriptive methods. Of course, there are an abundant number of articles, blogs, and war stories on why projects go bad, why methodology implementation fails, etc. But these are all related to execution difficulties, not whether or not project management is good or bad.
On a side note, one technique that we use when brainstorming is to take a ridiculous position just to get creative thinking and ideas generated. For example, when brainstorming about, let's say, how best to do PMO dashboarding, we might tee up the following questions:
- How can we ensure that nobody knows anything?
- How can be ensure that the data is too complex to understand?
- How can we confuse the executive team?
- etc, etc, etc.
Often times, by taking the contra or ridiculous position, it quickly brings out into the open new thinking and serves to identify new ideas to best get things right. Perhaps your search for articles arguing against PM is a similar kind of effort. Like Ed, you have piqued my curiousity too. Good luck in your search and please post back what you find..!
Mark Perry
VP of Customer Care
BOT International
