Advice Line | Bob Lewis | InfoWorld | How to promote good project management | June 9, 2006 05:56 AM

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How to promote good project management

June 09, 2006 | Comments: (0)

How to promote good project management

Dear Bob ...

Our company has a long history of lack of knowledge about project management. Many of the stories that are legend here harken back to a time when we were 1) much smaller, 2) most of our clients didn't care about project management, and 3) for those clients who did, the stories embody late nights and weekends getting things out the door for those awful people who didn't respect how much careful thought our work really took.

Having just read some advice about helping cultural change by emphasizing stories that feature the values and practices you'd like staff to adopt going forward, I'm at a loss as to how to make good project management exciting. Now we do have a number of projects here in any year that are in trouble, and have had some very successful "interventions," but those interventions aren't necessarily ones the project staff would like made public - "this project was really headed down the tubes until they started paying attention to project management!"

Anyway, any advice?

- PM Promoter

Dear Night-guy ...

You make an excellent point - communicating the value by holding up someone else's bad project as a poster child is bad form.

One popular strategy is to use statistics instead of anecdotes. While anecdotes have more persuasive power, statistics have the advantage of allowing the guilty to remain anonymous. I don't know where your company is in tracking project stats, though, and I suspect that for every failed project, there's another that squeaks through to "successful" completion through a combination of heroics, ingenuity, and redefinition of what "success" means.

Another is to start with one or two volunteers who are willing to try a new way of going about things, achieve success with them, and have them testify to the value of the new techniques to everyone else. In product terms, the organization will start with the pioneers, then persuade, in order, the early adopters, mainstream, and skeptics. The last hold-outs will either hold out until natural selection does its thing, or until they retire or are fired.

I don't know how to make good project management exciting, though. The whole point of it, after all, is to prevent excitement.

- Bob

Posted by Bob Lewis on June 9, 2006 05:56 AM

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Project management as American Idol, how sad.

I don't know how to make good project management exciting, though. The whole point of it, after all, is to prevent excitement.

I'm sure everyone has seen singers who over-sell every note. From their contortions and pained facial expressions you'd think the notes were being pushed out at great physical cost. Then there are the people who make it look easy. Unfortunately, the "emoters" seem to sway the audience. Get the two of them into a recording studio, though, and all the emoting in the world doesn't cover for a bad voice.

We do the same thing as that audience every time we look down on someone as being "just a nine-to-fiver". I think part of the solution is to stop congratulating and rewarding people for poor planning. If you work 100 hours a week for the last month before deadline you screwed up. No manager should ever be thanked by a project sponsor for heroic efforts to meet a deadline.

Posted by: Drew at June 9, 2006 08:05 AM

In my experience management doesn't seem to recognize good projectmanagement when they encounter it. In our company the PMs have the most access to management and most of the managing is done upwards. Then it is not the project that is being managed but the project plan.

One would wish for them to have the technical skills to understand the project and the interpersonal skills to establish good relationships with the folks who have to do the actual work. It happens but it is rare.

Posted by: Jon at June 14, 2006 08:56 PM

Hi,

Typical Typical. Not much you can do about this until something bad happens.

My experience as a IT Project /Programme Managment Trouble Shooter for some 20 years is that like Terrorism no one wants to do anything that restricts ones freedoms until people start getting killed on mass.

In my view your company has to suffer either litigation (if a software house) or huge financial loss (if an internal department of a large PLC).

However, even the later senario fails to work because the IT department is full of Spin Managers who in cohoots with sponsors want to get their bonuses so they turn failed IT deliveries into successes. SAD BUT TRUE

If I had a penny for everytime I have seen a request to deliver a Rolls Royce followed by an actual delivery of a 3 wheel Robin Reliant and it passed off as part of a phased delivery I would be a very wealthy man :)

Arrrr a world without Political IT Delivery - Utopia

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