Real Project Management

I want to begin this blog by talking about some practical issues in project management--at least as I see them. I have been managing projects since my early days as an electrical engineer, involved in designing communications equipment (around 1966). For the first 12 years or so, I practiced seat-of-the-pants project management, because it was all I knew how to do. After all, engineering schools teach technology, not management. And all of the other engineers I worked with practiced the same kind of project management, so I didn't know anything else.

Then I attended a seminar taught by Jim Bradford, who had been a project manager at NASA, managing a segment of the space program that had an annual budget of some 400 million dollars. It was my first exposure to a structured approach. Jim taught us how to create a work breakdown structure, then sequence the work to make a critical path network, and how to measure progress using earned value analysis. It was wonderful! I finally had a way of managing the project I was leading, which was to develop a shipboard communications receiver, and I returned to work and planned forward from where we were.

This was in the days B. P. C. (before personal computers), an era that anyone under 50 may have difficulty even imagining, so we had to use a mainframe scheduling program that required cardpunch and was a timeshare system. You fed your cards to the system, then waited several hours for the results, only to find that you had made a typo on one of the cards, which required a lot of time to find, and the whole thing was very frustrating. Nevertheless, we were trying to manage in a structured way.

The thing is, those tools for managing projects (work breakdown structures, schedules, etc.) did not make me a project manager. They are like a hand-held calculator--it won't make a CPA of anyone. I love what someone once said, "Give us powerful tools, and they only allow us to document our failures with great precision."

Yet many senior managers believe that if they have given you a copy of some scheduling software, then you are an instant project manager--all you need do is "add water and stir." And with all due respects to the Project Management Institute, the Project Management Body of Knowledge(R) does not really define project managment either (my membership number in PMI(R) is in the 7000s, and they are now up to 300,000 members, so I assure you I am a fan of the institute).
Project management is a performing art, and like any art, it is nearly impossible to define. You have tools and techniques. You have currently accepted practices. And they define the profession.
There was a time when a doctor would bleed a patient or use leeches to effect a cure. That was accepted medical practice at the time. Any doctor doing the same today would be guilty of mal-practice, and would lose his or her license.

The bottom line is that project management is about getting people to commit to and participate in all of the activities that must be performed to meet project objectives, to deliver a result that meets the needs of the ultimate client or customer. I have trademarked the term Projects are People(R) to emphasize this. In its essence, project managment is not a technical job at all, but a people job. So those individuals who do not like dealing with people generally struggle as project managers.

The most fascinating thing about project management is that it is the only approach ever devised for managing work, and so we now have traditional and agile methods, and these can be applied to almost any kind of project imagineable. In subsequent blogs, I'll discuss these and draw on the expertise of some of my colleagues to offer you some ideas about how to succeed in this challenging profession. For now, hang in there!