Project Managment: You Don't Know What You Don't Know

I have consulted with many Fortune 100 companies throughout my career. I always find it interesting how different the cultures can be, and how these differences influence the way projects get managed and work gets executed. One thing I find is that the discipline of project management varies greatly across organizations. However, I also find that project managers don't realize how much it varies, and where they sit across this variation.

What I mean by this is that project managers always believe that they are doing 'project management' as if it is a binary question...either you do it or you don't. However, what I find is that there are significant degrees of variation in the discipline, robustness and effectiveness of project management.

In some organizations, simply because there is someone who has a title of project manager, they believe they 'do project management'. However, those same organizations will lack the simple disciplines of issue, risk, scope and timeline management. In one large retail organization, they prided themselves on their ability to simply muscle through a project. They lacked the planning discipline, but thought it was OK, because they will simply work all day and all night to make a project successful. In fact, they were proud of this attribute. While this was true in small, less complex projects, it proved to scale as an approach to a very large, complex transformation project. Ultimately, this lack of discipline had a major impact on their customers.

I've also seen the position of PM minimizedto an administrative assistant of the person actually responsible for the project. In my experience, this is woefully ineffective and inadequate. The model that I have seen effective time and time again, is a project manager who is actually in charge of executing the project - with both business and IT people reporting into the PM. I also find that simply having a strong PM discipline isn't enough - because this focuses too much on the administrative aspects of a project. The softer elements of Project Management are paramount, but aren't covered by the PMI or PMP certification.

So yes, while solving business problems and improving business performance requires project management discipline. Often, however, project management discipline alone won’t guarantee success. Successful projects rely on another subtle element that is often overlooked: Effective project management. Read more in the free Clearbrick article on Effective Project Management. In this article, we draw the distinction between project management discipline and project management effectiveness and identify the key factors that contribute to effective project management.

Many project managers and organizations simply don't know what they don't know about exactly how well they do project management.