Madness in the Method

Project managers (PMs) rarely have extensive experience with people management, points out Dimension Data group executive: services Scott Petty. Worse, they are even more rarely assessed on their abilities as people managers.

"Typically they're running a team just for the length of that project. It's rare that they're going to be managing those people after that; it's rare that they're actually the original manager anyway - people are typically seconded into a project. So the project manager doesn't traditionally have great experience with people management skills. They typically have more skills with project management methodologies and how to get those projects done," Petty says.

Inexperienced project managers will find little to help them in the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK, developed by the Project Management Institute). As RNC Global Projects managing director Diane Dromgold points out, the PMBOK revolves around the project. There is scant instruction on how to get people to do the things that need to be done when they have to be done to achieve a planned outcome.

"Management is talking about the end and we as PMs are talking about the process. I sometimes wonder if we are even in the same conversation, the disconnect is so large," she says. "Every management textbook ever written has insisted on the centrality of getting people to work together. Yet when one tries to find where the textbooks spell out how to make that happen, typically the information is missing or so sketchy as to be unhelpful."

Dromgold points out all the nine core competencies of project management within PMBOK address project internals - they do not address how to make a project work. As a direct result, management has evolved into project administration. We know how to plan, schedule, resource, track and report in repeating cycles but we have not yet mastered the bit about actually getting the outcome, Dromgold says. The bottom line is that if a CIO bets his or her career on standard project management to deliver a complex, mission-critical, visible project, then they are "crazy-brave".

Dromgold says on the whole project managers in the project world and in IT have forgotten that the project is there to deliver an outcome for the business. What they deliver is a process, with even some project managers wrongly believing that the guaranteed route to a good outcome is a good process.

"Projects are used by organizations as a means to achieve something," Dromgold says. "The science of project management is about administration, and execution is largely ignored. In my humble opinion it is no wonder projects keep failing. We've worked out how to manage failure. We've lost the plot as project managers. We've forgotten how to execute. The answer is making sure that every single person knows what they have to do, when they have to do it, who they are depending on, who's depending on them, and what the consequences are of not doing it. It's as simple as that."

Of course even that on its own is unlikely to be sufficient. Cutter Fellow and project management guru Tom DeMarco sees the very phrase body of knowledge as misleading, implying the problems of project management are much more tractable than they really are. In DeMarco's view what distinguishes the good project manager from the bad is talent, not knowledge. "It's not [an issue of] what is missing from the PMBOK, it's that becoming a good manager is not a knowledge acquisition problem," he says.

To say good project managers are born, not made, is to tell a big part of the truth, he says. People can become adequate project managers by learning, but learning alone will never produce a great project manager. "Great project managers are born the way great people are born, in that they have the right personality. I don't think knowledge is enough because when all is said and done, the most knowledgeable project managers are not the best project managers. And becoming a more knowledgeable project manager doesn't contribute appreciably to your ability to manage projects.

"So I think the presumption that there is a 'body of knowledge' for project management is a little bit flawed. The body of knowledge is full of things pertaining to life cycle and procedure, and you certainly would be hampered as a project manager if you didn't know some of those things, but on the other hand it would not be fatal. I mean, people would look out for you and make sure you didn't make mechanical errors."

Moreover, DeMarco says there are gaping holes in the PMBOK because it only provides a formula for the formulaic parts of the project.

"The body of knowledge doesn't touch on any of the things that are most important," he says. "I'll give you an example. How do you decide to assign a piece of work to person A rather than person B, or to make one person a team leader rather than some other person? Those are bread-and-butter decisions you make in managing, and the body of knowledge doesn't speak to them at all, as if they didn't exist. It dodges all the hard questions and offers simplistic answers to the easy questions that any idiot could figure out a workable answer to," DeMarco says.