In all of my previous jobs, I noticed how poorly project management is handled. I investigated further into other companies and noticed the same thing.
To understand the problem, I stepped back and investigated why companies need project management. It turns out the concept of having a dedicated project management person or even a dedicated department only arose 10 – 20 years ago. It seems like, before that, projects were managed by other people. Who were these people? General managers, department managers, sales managers and (not) surprisingly, secretaries!
With so many people involved in “managing” a project, people (I believe it involved many consultants) started to believe that they need dedicated project management and supporting software. So far, so good. These project managers now are supposed to “manage” projects. That also means that these project managers need to tell all the other people (department managers, general managers etc.) what to do and when. These people do not want that. However, now we have even more people sharing the same responsibilities. Once, project managers start to fail, companies start to hire managers for project managers, and even more people get involved.
Is that the right approach? More people to solve confusion that arises because of too many people? What do they do, all these project managers? Well, when project management first starts, the managers would probably get a list together of all projects currently in the company and when they are due. Then they would try to understand how much work they need to squeeze into that limited time to finish the project. Then, they would add all the work for all the projects on a weekly or daily basis, compare it with the number of workers they have and then realise, whoops, we have too much work. Most likely they would then go to general management and tell them to work overtime, and from that point onwards, they would tell everybody all the time that everything is late and that everyone needs to rush to get things done. Great! Now somebody is saying out loud exactly what everybody already knew. (Did I mention that an expensive project management program is necessary to do that?
That approach has flaws. Moreover, I would like to introduce a different approach. Think of a company as a squirrel. The squirrel likes nuts (projects). It needs to find nuts (sales). Then it hides nuts (give them to operations). When the time is right, it finds the nuts again (finish the projects) and then eats the nuts (delivery). The most significant risk factor here is that the squirrel finds the nuts too late and the nut started rotting (the project is late). The worst case would be that the nuts are rotten and cannot be eaten anymore (project cancelled).
In classical project management, the project manager would make a list of how many nuts are hidden and where they are. Then he would say when precisely the nuts need to be eaten (project needs to end on time). To keep track of progress, he would tell the squirrel each day how many nuts to eat. The squirrel then does what the project manager said, and eat. For a few days, the squirrel can eat the number of nuts before it gets fat, unable to collect enough nuts for winter (sales drop). Sooner or later, the squirrel dies (bankrupt).
Let’s try another approach. The squirrel does what a squirrel does, find nuts, hide them, find them again when its time and eat them. Our project manager, in this case, recognises the number of nuts found (sales), he keeps track of where the squirrel buries the nuts…
