Project management as a business concept has become more heavily and widely adopted. But, as Charles Smith discovers, the idea still has its detractors.
Over the last few decades, the growth of the project mode of working has been phenomenal. The range has expanded from the traditional territory in construction and engineering into areas as diverse as the provision of health services, the reorganisation of emergency services, the delivery of aid to developing countries and the provision of accommodation for the homeless.
This remarkable expansion has been accompanied by the emergence of a strong profession, with influential institutions claiming to act as its custodians. These enterprising organisations formulate and codify knowledge and practices, set out the criteria and qualifications for different grades of membership and act as gatekeepers –controlling entry and exit, and awarding certificates to those who meet their standards.
Major corporations and government departments are also active, setting and promoting their own standard practices, driving forward the growth of project forms of working in their own organisations. The discipline has thus established itself at the centre of organisational life. And yet, all is not well – this simple picture of success is open to serious challenge.
PERFORMANCE DEFICIT
It is difficult to say what we are doing better as a result of the surge in project management. Major public sector projects regularly overspend, often by 30% or more (and sometimes by a factor of more than ten), or do not deliver their promised benefits. Major investments are initiated based on untried technology which later turns out not to be sound. New IT systems are developed at great expense, but then rejected by their intended users as unusable. It seems that projects, as human endeavours, are inherently unpredictable and flawed, both in their execution and in their outcome, and modern project management has not, as yet, done much to change this.
ALIENATION
For every committed believer in the value of projects, there are others who are disaffected, who regularly ask why something should be a project and don’t get an answer that satisfies them. These same people believe they are doing a useful and productive job and find that the imposition on their work of the concept of a project is irrelevant, distracting or even disruptive. Consultants in wider fields of management ask themselves whether an organisation would perform better if it adopted the project model for strategic delivery, and find the answer is resoundingly negative. So, why do the project profession and its allies in government and business seek to impose this model on everything?
THEORY, PRACTICE DISCONNECTION
While the discipline’s proponents enthusiastically recommend its tools and techniques, many experienced project managers believe that these bear little relation to the things they actually do – the skills they must employ to act effectively in the project world.
MAKING SENSE OF PROJECTS
To understand and deal with these issues we need to seek out the sense that can be made of projects, based on understandings of how they are experienced and handled by practitioners in the field.
A major recent contribution to this mode of investigation has come from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) funded Rethinking Project Management research network. This network, based in the UK and operated over a two-year period between 2004 and 2006, brought together leading academics and senior members of the project management profession from the UK and around the world.
The agenda of the research network covered the major topics and issues critical to the performance of projects. In typical sessions, presenters from a private company or government department would give a brief overview of the content of their work – perhaps a project or an organisation change programme – and then describe frankly and in detail what they actually did and what really happened. The academics and practitioners would then interrogate the stories, involving the speakers in the discussions. The aim of these interactions was to expose and explain the events of these projects within the organisational world in which they take place.
PROJECT REALITIES
We can use the many lessons from this research to challenge our assumptions, and seek out the realities of projects as actually practised. Instead of the orderly production-line world implied by mainstream discipline of project management, we find a complex world, driven by social and political forces. If we are to make sense of project realities, we must understand a wide range of topics, for example:
- the social world of organisations, their factions and power structures
- the processes through which projects (often fraudulent) come into existence
- the importance of individual volition in the creation of projects that are effective
- the diverse management styles, controlling or flexible, relevant to diverse forms of project
- the making of project decisions and the local heuristic models that support them
- the role of projects in business transformation
- the pursuit of wider forms of value: social impacts over extended timescales, rather than the mere production of outputs on a pre-defined date
- the acceptance that projects, as human and social endeavours, are inherently uncertain.
PROJECT-CRAFT PRACTITIONERS
Mainstream project knowledge, as codified by the institutions, concerns the possession of facts about tools and techniques. Because this knowledge is defined and codified, it is easy to acquire, and will qualify the student as a project operative. In contrast, we can consider the skills – the project-craft – of experienced practitioners who can deal effectively with the messy world of real projects. Project-craft cannot be acquired through taught courses, because it is embodied in expert action rather than in facts. Learning comes when project people, individually and collectively, have the opportunity to reflect on their practice within the working environment, to understand how to together go about our work. The challenge for organisations is to provide a suitable space for such learning, so that practitioners will gain the ability to create effective projects and, through them, deliver value.
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