Does project
management cover the management of the project front-end, the definitional,
development stages, or is it concerned essentially only with execution
delivery? What should it be responsible
for? How far does it stretch into
concept definition at one end and operations at the other?
Morris, Peter. Reconstructing Project Management Reprised: A
Knowledge Perspective. Project Management Journal, Vol. 44, No.
5, October 2013, p13.
With this post I embark on what I hope will be a series of
nine posts, which diverge considerably from how I have historically presented
content on this blog. My focus has been
on PM Best Practices and, as a practicing PM, my posts – at least from my
perspective – have been intended as practical guides for the functioning PM in
the trenches. For the next couple of
months, however, I’m going to wander into the (cue theme from The Twilight Zone) wilderness of PM Existentialism.
Peter Morris authored Reconstructing Project Management
(2013) and was invited by PMJ to
encapsulate the book for its readers. If
permitted (I’ve asked the publishers of PMJ
for permission, which is still pending, to quote from the article for this
series), I plan to take nine questions that Morris highlights in the article (Figure
3 Current issues in project management as a discipline, p13) and add my
commentary and color, hopefully without getting too lost.
However, I don’t want to give the impression that Morris’
article is these nine questions (which, by the way, are also on page 111 in the
book) or, even, that they are the central theme. In the article’s eighteen pages, Morris
condenses, presumably, the topics, points, arguments and themes of two-thirds
of his book. I’m pulling these nine
questions, then, completely out of context and I encourage you to read the
article (and the book) to understand his thesis. When I read these nine questions, though,
they spoke to me so deeply that I felt compelled to explore them beyond the
(here I avoid the use of “mere” or “just”, maybe “unadorned” works) concrete
expression that Morris has given us.
Further, I believe there is a tenuous link to my series on Governance.
By tossing these questions, like grenades, on the floor without
further expanding on them, Morris challenges us to face the assumptions and
core values that define our profession.
Practically a post’s worth of preamble, so let’s get to it…
Enterprise leadership holds their quarterly off-site to
review strategy. They return and the
business line VP needs to replace the legacy, proprietary application with a
cloud-based SaaS application that is the market leader. She assigns a director responsibility for
accomplishing this, who engages a manager to lead the day-to-day tactical
project delivery effort. The manager,
following the company’s methodology, prepares a business case, a charter, a
staffing plan and a time and cost schedule.
These are approved by the Director and the project kicks off.
Who is the project manager for this project?
There is so much depth and complexity in Morris’ first
question (above). When I took the PMP
certification exam, the model project manager we were told to visualize was the
construction PM for whom a sponsor provided money in exchange for a commitment
to scope and time. At that time I worked
for a large IT consulting and project management company with aspirations of
offering clients responsibility to deliver their projects – high value
contracting based on responsibility for deliverables, not time and materials.
Fast forward to the world of today: that company is limping along as a has-been,
ne’er-heard-of-‘em firm and the PM community is bifurcated between reality and
wants. As a profession, we want
responsibility for the projects, but in an enterprise reality where, instead,
we are just responsible for delivery for someone else.
Executives, managers, and operations leadership make the
strategic decisions about what projects to run and have ownership of the
operational project decisions (funding, scope, who will be on the team and
whether to pull the plug when things go akilter). They don’t want the mundane tactical
responsibilities (and risks) of project delivery, but at the same time there
are three market factors that prevent the elevation of professional project
leaders into that sphere. First, those
operational leaders, having gotten where they are, are not going to trust
someone else with the responsibility (and esteem) for success with their vision. Second, without projects, their jobs are
just, let’s face it, boring. Projects
are the spice to the same daily gruel they otherwise consume (and that consumes
them). They live vicariously through our
efforts.
The third condition that reinforces the status quo is that, if other project managers are anything like me,
we love delivering projects and don’t want those boring, mundane operational
responsibilities. We are too happy doing
what we’re doing to want to trade this for the better world where projects are
run by project professionals, but at the cost that we are tied down to
quarterly budget cycles, annual personnel reviews (which, btw, should be annual
budget cycles and quarterly personnel reviews), product support and
maintenance, and enforcing all the petty practices and policies of the very
model of a modern major enterprise.
So we take the bones we’re fed, we deliver the project to
scope, time and cost (or, in a more mature organization, to process), celebrate
the successful delivery, hand it over to them to support, and happily walk away
to pre-storm with our next project team.
© 2014 Chuck
Morton. All Rights Reserved.
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