Over the past few years, the project management industry has become excellent at dissecting what needs to be done to run a project. We’ve been able to do time-motion studies and create sophisticated tools to the point at which they can be automated. We can deliver over the Internet via software products, which many organizations think are capable of running projects by themselves. We have attempted to take what in the past was considered to be the apex of project manager's career and explain it to the point at which even a beginner can be promoted to the title of a project manager.
As with all industries, we have matured. In that maturation, we have set higher and higher standards for ourselves. In the beginning, it was acceptable just to get the project done. As we moved on, more and more complexities were driven into the project and we had to deal with them as well (O‘Brochta, 2002). In reaction to these additional requirements and greater complexities, we reverted back to the more traditional way of doing things by trying to break them down into smaller and smaller segments that can then be distributed to less-trained team members for the execution of the work.
In the beginning of developing those complexities, a group of farsighted individuals decided to form the Project Management Institute (PMI). The founders saw the creation of PMI as a necessary part of continuing to move our industry forward by creating a repository for the best ideas on how to run projects. If it hadn't been for some of the more forward-thinking individuals, we would not be where we are today. The Project Management Institute has been developed by volunteers for years and continues to be one of the premier associations. The founders collected ideas, developed and printed them, and these ideas became A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide). From this humble beginning, grew a huge industry of certification, teaching, and best practices, culminating in annual global congresses, where this information is disseminated.
The PMBOK® Guide started its life as a small pamphlet. The first one, copyrighted in 1996, is brief and a total of 176 pages. The 2000 edition of the PMBOK® Guide was 216 pages, and the third edition, issued in 2004, evolved to 390 pages. The fourth and most recent edition, published in 2008, is 467 pages. This incredible increase in the size of the PMBOK® Guide is a direct result in not only the increased knowledge we have in project management, but it also attempts to deal with ever growing responsibilities expected of the project manager.
Our education system and our business life have trained us to break down ideas into simple tasks that can be passed on and then capture that information in a way that can be standardized across all industries and cultures. Therefore, we have an academic leaning toward Project Management Institute, which focuses on developing documentation and identifiable standards. At the same time, we have a homogenization of the work requirements necessary to make it useful in all countries and industries. However, requirements to harmonize have their downside: the greater number of people we attempt to serve with the same processes, the further we may get away from being able to truly deliver on specific requirements of our customers.
When project management was first recognized as an important required asset to an organization (in this case, the United States Department of Defense), it was because no one person could retain all information necessary to completing the assigned task in his or her head. Therefore, the individual who was able to bring a group together, move forward under difficult circumstances, and deliver a product with stringently defined requirements was critical. Herein was the birth of the Project Management Institute and the industry we are now working in.
This simple shift in ideas has created a tremendous industry and jobs for thousands of people; it has also allowed us to spread our knowledge across the entire globe and run “projects” using people we have never met. In some cases, people who have worked on the same project for years have never actually heard the voice of the other person they work with on a regular basis. In the past few years, this has been taken one step further, and the great outsourcing and in-sourcing debate through corporations, where one person in the United States or in Europe can be equally replaced with people in another country for one quarter of the cost. Seven years ago, when I had the honor of presenting at the Global Congress for the first time on outsourcing, I predicted that this trend would change and it has done just that. Corporations and organizations are realizing that one individual is not like another because of culture, language, and training. Sometimes it is better to pay for someone in a more expensive country because there may be a difference in productivity. This trend of breaking all work down into simple pieces, which can be distributed, has been pushed to the nth degree by Amazon, which has created a website called the Mechanical Turk, where you can take a project and break it down into very small pieces. Each individual will do a small piece for a very small price. If we make this our final conclusion, and if project management is all about following this guide, then Amazon's Mechanical Turk will replace us.
Project Management Institute is an organization of volunteers who decide on the path and ideas of the Institute. Surveys are being done continuously to make sure PMI is serving the greatest good; because of this, the responsibility for the proliferation of standardized tests and requirements can only rest squarely on the shoulders of all of us - individuals who are members of the organization. This is completely understandable because it is very easy to test and document the processes necessary to running a good project. Not only is it easy to document, it is easy to teach, it is easy to test, and it is easy to certify.
It becomes more and more obvious that this standardization and breaking all requirements down into documentable and testable processes have not been working to deliver the best we can. For the past 30 years, we have been improving the project management process, and we are getting better and better at documentation, as well as being able to use computers to continue to schedule and track our activities. However, we do not seem to be able to get any better percentages in projects completed meeting all necessary requirements. Of course, there are exceptions to this and we are moving slowly in that direction but, as the Standish Group always says, there is room for improvement. So, the only conclusion that we can draw from almost 30 years of developing standards is that, although this may be part of the answer, it is not the entire answer. We must look elsewhere to complete project success on a much broader scale.
The PMI organization itself, if you look carefully, also gives us some interesting information to arrive at the same conclusion. In the Project Management Journal (Starkweather, 2011, p 31), 15 hiring criteria were identified in a survey. The survey canvassed 32 IT recruiters and 3,258 IT executives (p. 36). The question presented was: What is the most important characteristic when hiring a project manager?
The IT recruiters believe that the PMP certification meets some of the most important criteria for getting a job in the IT industry. The IT executive survey told a completely different story. 34.6% of the IT executives who regularly hire project managers thought the PMP was irrelevant (p.37), and out of the 15 criteria, they placed the PMP certification last. What was the first thing that the majority (94.8%) of the IT professionals thought was important? The first thing was leadership and the second was communication skills; hence, we are falling into an industrial trap set for us before even most of our grandparents were born….
During the Industrial Revolution, factory owners recognized that it was important to have individuals with skills to be able to run the various machines in their factories. In order to have a good supply of workers, a mandatory educational system was created. This educational system was broken down into simple tasks that could be taught broadly. It included a merit system based on how well each individual was able to learn these simple tasks and then recite them. The merit system evolved into grades and the grading system has been what we use today. The educational system used back then was designed to produce academics, not project managers. Taking the academic approach to developing new and better project managers is a false approach, which we have now come to know and embrace.
We need to change the way we look at projects and how we develop and encourage project managers. We absolutely need to have them understand the processes that have gone before, but we must also start helping them to understand how important the leadership component of project management is. There are many project managers who are exceedingly well paid and well respected and who have no credentials after their name. We all know people who have many credentials after their name, but who couldn't manage their way out of a paper bag. We don't need an evolution in project management. We have been evolving this academic idea for many years. What we need to do is have a revolution in project management, step away from the ability to measure and codify work, and bring it into the realm of leadership. This is not an easy task, because project leadership is all about dealing with people. When you bring a group of individuals together, the unexpected happens, the nonstandard gets in the way because individuals cannot be standardized and put in the box. The standard process for talking about leadership would be to come up with the academic understanding that vision and mission are needed; in some ways, these are very true and absolutely necessary to getting a new project manager marching orders and sending him or her off and expecting him or her to be successful. Project leadership is all about mentoring new project managers, working with them directly, and helping them through the process so that when a difficult situation comes up, they don't need to refer to a book. It would be better if they would refer to a person who has already gone through the process.
This requires a whole new set of skills. It requires that we become more creative in our ideas, our processes, and in the way we motivate individuals. Many organizations have project managers across functional areas, and expect them to succeed - rightly so. Yet, many project managers, not fully mastered true project leadership, in fact are discouraged because “they have all of the responsibility but none of the power.” Because of the academic system that we've been brought up in, power is the only way to motivate; however, a true project leader understands that influence is a greater motivator and is a way for project managers to continue to survive in turbulent times. Simple distinctions like this can make the difference between the success or failure of a project, which means that the project manager cannot necessarily go through a checklist to make sure that he or she has done everything; instead, the project manager has to become more creative in leading the project. He or she has to understand not only what the team needs to do, but what is needed, in terms of growing the people the PM is leading
This view requires us as project leaders to drive and become more innovative and more motivating than ever before, which means that we need to be comfortable not only with all of the information on the best practices we learn through PMI, but also willing to move and have the ability to change those processes as necessary for the organization and for the project's success. This means that project managers must have not only the time and need to getting the work done, but reassure the organization that a PM can be creative and motivate, lead the team. They must have a firm belief in their abilities as well as their industry to stand up for what they know is right.
Easy is Hard and Hard is Easy
During these times of global distractions, recession, and uncertainties with high level of unemployment, it is hard to talk about our ability to stand up for what is right instead of what is the most secure way to run a project. This brings up one of the interesting paradoxes of project leadership. If a project manager takes the easy way out, does not make waves, and follows all of the directions laid out by his or her organization, whether they conform to standards or not, he or she may endanger their ability to stay employed. We have seen through countless examples that, more often than not, blindly following the standardized processes may lead to project failure. Instead, a great project manager goes ahead and works with the system, but continues to improve it, challenges it, and uses it to the project's benefit by continuing to advocate for his or her team and other individuals. Although this challenging a status quo may be perceived as risky, such project manager will be seen as a team leader and will be continually sought after by various organizations. This leadership potential and ability will be recognized and rewarded.
People in project management know that they need to constantly and rapidly innovate. They need to create a creative practice process to allow them to present new ideas and concepts and test them out on various projects. The advantage the project leaders have is that through the life-time of their projects, they have a luxury of experience to go through short iterations in which they learn what is best and then they can proceed implementing them. Most project managers understand that lessons learned can be valuable. Over time, a project leader's greatest value could be his or her ability to integrate not only lessons learned, but continually hashing out new processes with the team to always improve what they are doing, to the point at which the entire team is involved in the innovative process. Most project leaders will start to follow a trend in which dealing with people is more important than dealing with the techniques; they will follow that kind of use and allow their intuition and organization to work better over the long run.
Fast is Slow and Slow is Fast
Lets look at the second project leadership paradox. With tight timeframes and individuals pushing hard to make sure that all of the requirements have been completed, some project managers may lose sight of the important processes that will make the project successful in the long run. We talk about team development and the importance of teamwork, but when the rubber hits the road, we are all about executing the deliverables, and we may sacrifice personal interactions that are necessary for the successful execution of a project. In many ways, the individuals who spend time developing their teams over years are much more like project leaders than a project manager who drop in and put a team together, get a project out, and leave for yet another endeavor. Project leaders recognize that interacting over a period of time with their team and developing a social contingency will not only make individuals work harder and longer, they will also enjoy their work in the long run.
One of the great challenges in teaching project leadership is that it is not something that can be done overnight. Success and leadership need to be studied, dealt with, and continually refined over a period of time. It is a difficult process whereby one learns the subtle skills in order to work with individuals for everyone's greater good. In many Western cultures, this is the antithesis of what most people believe true leadership to be. Most Western civilizations have been brought up with the idea that an individual must be infallible and always in front, leading the great charge by speaking and/or direct action. This is the general military idea of leadership, which hasn't been used in the military since the American Civil War. The new idea of leadership is where the individual who is anointed the leader is the one who serves the best over the period of time. It is the individual who creates influence not only in his or her organization, but also outside of the organization. This is not something that can be standardized or taught in a classroom environment. It must be coached over a period of time to help individuals understand what needs to be done and how to do it in accordance with the specific situation at hand.
This paper attempts to shed light on one of the great challenges we have in the project management industry. We are distracted by the ability to create simple checklists instead of taking the harder route—the less traveled route of understanding the team and developing a process by which we can succeed through other people. Project leaders, time and time again, who do succeed (better than average project managers) have leadership styles that go against what is actually in the mainstream media. These individuals understand that the team will come up with better solutions than any one individual ever could and rely on the team dynamics to get through the hard parts instead of relying on a project manager.
Even the title of “project leader,” for some individuals is too high a title. Individuals have moved toward team leader, or first among equals, to show they do not necessarily want the power, but are looking to develop influence over time, which drives greater success, greater interest, and greater and greater productivity. We must shed the idea that we have to manage a team and begin getting into the hard work really needed to lead the team. Project management is not clean work, just checking off boxes and making sure documents are filled out. Project leadership is a challenging work of getting individuals inspired and moving toward a greater goal.
If we truly want to become more relevant and more commercially successful, we need to change the way we think about managing projects and we need to start leading them. We need to stop worrying about what color our project chart is and start worrying about what the people and talents are on the project team. We need to stop being interested in developing power and reporting structures and start being fascinated by the people around us, develop the influence necessary to actually getting the job and keeping our profession successful in the long run. We need to be able to be creative and excited about the processes and understanding the frameworks. Utilizing a detailed process through each one of our teams will make absolutely sure that we have the best solution for the team and the requirements. We have been distracted from this truth, which has gotten us to the point in which our failure rate has not improved nearly as well as the amount of documentation we can create. It is time now to leverage the nonelectronic and paper processes to make sure that we create higher order skills that will benefit our industry, our world, and by being able to deliver more effective processes to products and projects with teams that are excited. In many ways, if a project leader can focus on getting his or her team to do the work, the necessary requirements will fall back in line because they are all focused on one area.
Project leadership is not a simple or easy process, nor will it be fast, but if we stay the course and work with our teams and institutions, we have the ability to take this industry to a new level—a revolution of sorts—making project leadership as a requirement necessary for the successful completion of both commercial and governmental tasks. I am certain none of this will be easy, but this is the job we must do to stay relevant in this new competitive economy.