The Next Frontier for Project Managers is NOT Project Management

Ronn Faigen is the General Manager for APMG-US, part of APMG International, a global accreditation and qualifications organization. In this capacity, Ronn is responsible for increasing the awareness and adoption of internationally recognized best practices, among them PRINCE2®, Managing Successful Programs (MSP™) Portfolio, Program and Project Offices (P3O®) and ITIL®. Prior to joining APMG-US, Ronn held a number of executive management positions in technology companies involved in digital imaging, educational software, and high availability clustered computing. Ronn began his career with IBM, where he spent fourteen years in a variety of customer-facing roles.

To quote Abraham Maslow, “It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”  Is this the current state of affairs in Project Management?
I have to provide full disclosure and confess that I am not a practicing Project Manager. At one point in my peripatetic career, I was an “accidental Project Manager,” one of those duffers who was assigned to manage a multi-million dollar project because I was available. Short of reading parts of the MS Project manual, I have never gone through any formal training. But in my current role, I am connected to Project Managers on a daily basis. I am also involved with a much broader range of disciplines and certifications that extend beyond Project Management. And I am concluding that at the end of the Project Management world, just like the old maps from the Middle Ages, there is a sign reading “Here Be Dragons.”

This is illustrated by a recent experience. I was speaking with a consultant whose firm specializes in Project Management. He was explaining that his client had just secured a contract worth over $200M. He would be working closely with them, creating methodologies, conducting training sessions, and providing Project Management expertise.  But the more I explored this opportunity, the more it became apparent that his client had actually landed a $200M Program. While Project Management skills would certainly be required, Program Management skills were probably even a higher priority if the customer wanted to stay off the pages of the Chaos Report. I suggested that perhaps the consultant ought to be looking at bringing in some Program Management training or professionals with Program Management skills. I could almost see his eyes glaze over.

This is not an isolated experience. A very seasoned executive from an internationally recognized research organization recently told me about an experience working with a large government agency who treated everything as a project, no matter how large or how complex. That was because they had invested large sums of money in building Project Management skills and it was through this lens that they were viewing the world. Her conclusion was that the question was when, not if, failure would occur.

Why does Project Management have such an appeal while Program Management or Portfolio Management gets such short shrift? I certainly don’t have the definitive answer, though I do have some hunches. Go to any of the large Project Management training companies and search on Program Management. If you find any offerings, they will be dwarfed by the range of available Project Management offerings. So maybe it is the fault of the training companies for not actively marketing these skills to their corporate customer or students?  Or it could be the fault of companies who don’t see the strategic value in having a well functioning Project Office (the first thing that seems to get cut when revenue falls) or in having their executives make the commitment of time and energy that Program Management requires. Or it could be the fault of the individual professional who stops their training after having achieved their project management certification. Is there any data available on this? It would be a fascinating study.

Many large companies understand that there are disciplines beyond Project Management. Not only Program Management, but Portfolio Management, Risk Management, and how to establish a Project Management Office are skills that require training and focus. The real enlightened companies even foster skills in Change Management, an often overlooked component of successful project and program delivery. But the high rate of project failure, even with an ever growing population of trained project managers, perhaps indicates that more companies and more professionals need to expand their horizons.

The French have a term, “déformation professionnelle.” This is the tendency to view things from the vantage point of your profession rather than from a broader perspective.  Project Management is a critical skill. No argument. But not everything is a project. Just as everything is not a nail, no matter how skillfully you wield your hammer.

Copyright ©2011 Ronn Faigen