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Project Management Maturity

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The first step in learning project management maturity

In my previous blog (link>>) I mentioned the resistance to learn. This resistant to learn has several causes and several consequences on which I want to build up a conceptual model that will enable us to create organizations with the ability to learn from their mistakes. Organizations that will become more capable in managing their projects. The model I will lay down for you will boost your project management maturity.

The first major obstacle

Often we see, the more senior people become, the less they want to change their world view. This is one of the reasons that some of them resist the powerful change that the Agile movement is bringing to project management. Some of the seniors are still very skeptical. What they fail to see is that project management throughout its history has always adapted to new situations. There used to be a time that the Master Builder and the Project Manager were one and the same person. Therefore I made the statement that we have never been classical and always been agile.

This lack of agility in learning has a severe negative effect on the development of project management. The problem with becoming more experienced, more senior, is that ‘you know’ more. Through trial and error you have learned, and you have succeeded. You have invested a lot of your effort into becoming a successful project manager, not without sacrifice. You have built up a self-image.  In the meantime the world around you is slowly changing and the effectiveness of ‘your ways’ is slowly diminishing. But whatever happens, you feel the need to defend your self-image. It is hard to admit that your way is not any longer the way.

A new generation of project managers

New people, with different ideas are now entering the project management scene. Suddenly we have program managers, portfolio managers, project support officers and scrum masters. It seems that they preach a different gospel. The senior feels uncomfortable and tells it is old wine in new wineskins. Perhaps he’s right, but nobody believes him anymore. The momentum of the new ways can be overwhelming, the senior is in denial. This psychological process is called cognitive dissonance and it prevents us from learning. Every human being is subjected to it, and it increases the older you become. That’s why a lot of elderly people are so conservative. But take care the transformation is inevitable, and at some point in time the senior becomes obsolete. Because the language he speaks isn’t spoken any longer, and with it the communication stops.

The problem with this, is that valuable lessons learned are not transferred from one generation project managers to the next. The ‘youngsters’ will have to reinvent solutions for problems that were solved long time ago. Also there is a new generation of decision makers that are facing these issues. Both become vulnerable to the guru or the account manager of the training institute that is selling some ‘disruptive’ new methodology. The oldies in our profession mumble that there is nothing new, and partially they are right, but nobody is really paying attention to them anymore. Just because they don’t speak the new language.

I have been more than 30 years active in project management. I’m an addictive reader about project management. I have studied many of the old ways. I’m amazed by the number of solutions I have seen that were found during the history of project management, and our failing to harvest what’s already available.

The old generation of project managers

When the senior resists the new ways of thinking he stops communicating. At a personal level this can become disastrous, but he alone is the one that has to face these consequences. It bothers me more that the old and the young don’t communicating any more. The transfer of experience will stop, and this should be a major concern of any organization, because this destroys the investment that was made in development of the senior.

We need to set up programs in which experience is exchanged. The seniors will coach the junior in becoming strong and stable personalities to withstand the powers that are exerted on them. The young will teach the senior to understand the new language. This needs in a new type of training program, which focusses more on exchange that on knowledge. On learning to learn project management from your peers, but it supersedes the traditional peer-to-peer exchanges. Exchange is just a part of it.

In my own experience one of the most rewarding experiences in becoming more senior is to pass it on to the next generation of project managers. That’s why I became trainer, and started to write books. Just to secure the flow of exchange. The assumption that a 50-year-old project manager doesn’t have to learn or to develop is an egoistic attitude. We all stand on the shoulders of those that have shown us the path. The senior need to take on responsibility to take care that the old ways are integrated into the new. This is true innovation.

Experience echange between senior and junior project managers will enhance the project management maturity in your organization.

This idea can be applied on each organizational level. In the organization as a whole, and in a specific project for which you are the project management. The first step is identify the seniors and the juniors, and bring them together and facilitate the learning process.

You need to be aware that this is the first part of a learning concept. The next components will be exposed in the following blogs.

Agile the holy grail of project management (?)

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Agile the holy grail of project management

This is the second blog that resulted out of my learning experience during the Zurich 2016 Expert Seminar on 18 and 19 February 2016. You can find the first blog over here>>. During one of the streams we talked about classical versus non classical project management. I mentioned that it sometimes looks as if Agile is a new holy grail.

When I searched for “Agile”, using Google, I got 80,600,000 results, a staggering result. “PRINCE2” only gave me 6,040,000 results, and IPMA some disappointing 670,000 results. So it seems to support the idea that Agile is indeed the Holy Grail of project management.

The manifesto

In 2001 the name Agile, as we now know it, was born with the Agile Manifesto. It is a high level document that communicates a desire to change the way that we have been delivering software during the 20th century. When you read it, you cannot disagree with it. The authors wrote: “We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others to do it.” I think this should be the mission of every software engineer on the face of this earth. They advocate a strong focus on: individuals and interactions, working software, customer collaboration and responding to change.

When you read it, it is surprising that we even need to write this down. The software industry in a whole has failed to live up to our expectations. Time and time again expectations are not met, and, when Agile can make the difference, we can do only one thing and that is to warmly welcome it.

Failing projects

When you search for “failing projects” you will get 94,700,000 hits and “failing project management” another 68,400,000. The order of magnitude is about the same as the amount of hits we get for Agile. This makes me wonder, is this a coincidence or do we witness another phenomenon?

Let me try to give you my interpretation.

Mankind is advancing, there are more people on the face of this earth than ever before. Technology is developing at an astonishing pace. Globalization, geopolitics, available communication channels have made the world a complex place to live in. The challenges we face are incomparable with those of the previous century. These challenges are and will be met by projects. These projects are becoming increasingly complex. Whatever we do we will be confronted with failure. This is inevitable and, by the way, there is nothing bad about it. Because the only way to learn is to fail, to reflect and to improve. Agile is just one of those improvements in doing projects, but it will not be Agile alone. We will need to look further.

What do we mean by saying that’s classical?

In my previous blog I made an argument that there is no such thing as classical project management. But still this designation is used and cannot be ignored. What does someone mean when he says, that’s “old thinking”, or that’s “classical”? On the internet I found 4,880,000 hits, that’s a lot, there must be a market for the distinction between the classical and the non-classical. What is the underlying need to which the authors are responding?

Mostly they want draw our attention to a better way of managing a projects. Instead of using a strict description of all the software deliverables at the start of the project they propose that it is better to do this once every two weeks and work in sprints instead of using the stages of the waterfall method. It seems as if this works better for IT projects, at this moment.

Saying something is classical, means that there is a suggestion for a better approach.

The problem with a Holy Grail

The 80,600,000 hits show that Agile is booming. The social pressure to use Agile is tremendous, we are in a stage that everyone has to adopt it. If you don’t use it, you will become obsolete. Training is booming, certifications are everywhere. Enormous amounts of money and effort are invested in implementing the Holy Grail. Will it work? It is just a method that you buy, and somewhere in time it too will become obsolete. The more you have invested in it, the more difficult it becomes to accept that. That is the real problem with a Holy Grail, you will become blind for the next disruptive change. The Grail has stopped the learning process.

My suggestion would be a new manifesto, one that has at least the next line in it: We value learning above the method.

Projects are learning experiences

I’m a skeptic as you may have noticed. I don’t believe in one method, one philosophy, one solution to all our project problems. Next to that, I definitely don’t believe the sales manager from a consultancy or training firm. I realize they are there to sell and to make their owners rich, preferably very rich.

But I do believe in improvement which is a synonym of learning. That’s my Holy Grail, that’s more Agile than Agile itself. At the start of each project, each stage, product backlog, decision to be made or milestone to achieve, I wonder: “Could we do better?”  This question has always the same answer: “Yes”.

Things to come

I’ve made the next step after the conclusion in my previous blog that there is no such thing as classical project management, we now came to the conclusion that projects are learning experiences that need to be geared towards a continuous cycle of stepwise improvement. So in my next blog you can read about this learning experience that projects need to become.

Classical project management versus non-classical

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Classical and non-classical project management

18 and 19 February 2016 I was one of the speakers at the IPMA Expert Seminar in Zurich. One of the streams, in which I delivered a lecture and facilitated a workshop, was about classical project management versus non-classical. It was one of these seminars that I will cherish as a learning experience and has inspired me to write a series of blogs to extend the message that I tried to communicate. I hope that it will inspire you to think out of your ‘project management box’.

Does classical project management exist?

You need to know that I’m a radical skeptic. This does not mean that I don’t believe in something, but that I doubt all that I believe. I can never be sure that my ideas are true. This enables me to step out of the mental models that I have built up during my lifetime. This sceptic attitude results also in that when someone mentions the distinction between classical and non-classical, I wonder whether there is something as ‘classical’ project management.

It is commonly believed that project management is invented in the 20th century, as a kind of late offshoot of the scientific management movement. With the Gantt chart as a popular technique. I do not agree with this. For me that is too easy and just copying what everyone is telling. From the start of civilization, the human kind has built solid structures like temples, places to gather, theaters, irrigation canals, and so on. It has fought its wars, build kingdoms, sailed the oceans, and explored the unknown. Now you tell me, if those weren’t projects? And if they were, there should have been someone that managed the work to be done.

Project management of something that is new

When we think of projects we always think about sets of activities that are non-routine. We have to deliver something that has a number of new elements, and therefore it needs a different kind of management attention.  Now think about the pyramids in Egypt, this was something new, or what about the temple structures in Angkor Wat in Cambodia, the Chinese wall and the Alhambra in Granada Spain. There always have been leaders that were responsible for ‘managing the project’. When project management is managing the new, it is by definition non-classical. Therefore, we don’t need this distinction. To take it one step further …

We have never been classical

This awareness opens a new set of opportunities for me. Because I can adapt techniques from the past as well as techniques from the present. Without being afraid that I’m doing something old fashioned that isn’t professional anymore. Are you aware that ‘classical’ often is used with a negative connotation? It is used by consultants in an almost fanatic manner to promote a certain (often agile) method. The tremendous effect of the Agile Manifesto combined with the commercial efforts of training agencies to sell Scrum trainings, Kanban boards and others, make you feel that you are missing the boat. But saying that project managers need to become more Agile in order not to lose their jobs is denying the history of projects.

We have always been Agile

The distinction between Agile and non-Agile is one that, although proposed by many, is highly ambiguous, and more a mental construct or even just an ordinary sales argument. When we define project management as the management of something new, with a unique combination of different people, with different disciplines and personalities, within a certain time frame, that delivers value to others, then it can never be non-agile. So just as classical versus non-classical, I strongly doubt the difference between agile and non-agile in project management. When something is not agile it stops to be project management. There is no non-agility in project management!

What can you expect, from this blog on?

The stage is set, the distinctions disappeared, there is a clean slate, let’s build up our thinking about project management from scratch. Let’s step out of the project management thinking box. From now on I will try to upload a new blog more frequently, lets aim for one each week. Allow me to be your guide in this experiment to stretch our thinking about project management. These are the topics you can

  • Another holy grail than Agile.
  • D0 projects exist?
  • The disciplinary matrix of project management.
  • Goal setting, feedback and other project management hazards.
  • The problem with language.
  • The zone of proximate development.
  • Cultural Historical Action Theory for project managers.
  • The automated project manager.

These are some ideas I want to investigate, but I will subject myself to the associative process of the (my) human brain and will follow were this leads me. If you like this, notify the people in your network to my blog, and let’s build a network of professionals that will step out of the current project management thinking box.