Modern Project Management: Key Obstacles and How to Overcome Them

[MichaelDortch]

In my previous post on modern project management, I echoed comments from ServiceNow and others about how the role of project managers (PMs) is evolving from "enforcer" to "enabler" of business goals. This evoked some cogent and interesting commentary from someone who has far more direct project management experience than I.

That person is Larry Cooper, a member of the board at the Ottawa Valley-Outaouais Chapter of the Project Management Institute (PMI). Larry is also the co-author of an excellent, thought- and, one hopes, action-provoking book: "Agile Value Delivery: Beyond the Numbers." You can read about the thinking behind the book in a great LinkedIn post by Larry. You can also learn more about Larry, his co-author Jen Stone, and the book itself, and purchase your very own electronic copy, at leanpub.com. I strongly suggest that you do both, and encourage your colleagues to do the same. Meanwhile, here's what Larry had to say in response to my previous post.

"At a recent PMI conference one of the keynote speakers remarked that 'PMs can't delegate' in a list things that get in the way of their ability to deliver. That fits very well with your 'enforcer' versus 'enabler' analogy.

"An earlier version of the PMBOK [Project Management Body of Knowledge] introduced a concept that became referred to as the 'iron triangle.' The essence of it is that scope is inflexible but time and cost can be negotiated. The off-shoot of this thinking typically put the project manager in the unenviable position of having to protect the scope (i.e. what the business would get) because they were also held to dates and costs that had also been agreed to — usually before scope was even known!

"The result was that few if any projects could be considered successful if on scope, on time and on cost were the measure of success. So the PM would invariably try to stop scope changes from happening and the way to do that was to have big up-front everything—plans, budgets, requirements, designs, etc. While [this approach] matched waterfall thinking, it rarely delivered what the business actually needed.

"PMs need, as you say, to understand that their role is most definitely not to be the enforcer but rather the enabler of project success. That also applies to executive leadership whose role it is to create the right environment and support systems to both cultivate and inculcate the right mindset throughout their organizations for that success to happen.

"Practices may be important, but not nearly as much as this basic premise."

Call it logrolling if you want, but I couldn't agree more with Larry. And to overcome the challenges of the "iron triangle" and "cultivate and inculcate the right mindset" he describes requires potentially disruptive recasting of how project management and project managers are viewed by each organization.

A good place to start: developing and encouraging the "soft skills" recently identified by CompTIA as essential to the success of IT leaders and their teams. The need for such skills clearly extends beyond IT, to include "executive leadership" and project management leaders and teammates. The sooner those leaders and team members are encouraged to move beyond traditional metrics and take more business- and human-centric approaches, the more successful and valuable to the enterprise their efforts will become.