Project Profile Matters and Agile

One of my most often used statements in project management is "it depends", because it does.

How long should the project charter be? How many activities should I use? Who should I include as stakeholders on my project? These are all questions with answers that begin; "it all depends"

A construction project in Argentina, an IT project in New Delhi and a drug development project in Denver require very different execution approaches and differing knowledge, skills and abilities to successfully manage the project. A construction project in Argentina can vary significantly by size, by the complexity of the technology, by the tightness of the schedule, by the knowledge and expectations of the client. To understand the knowledge skill and abilities needed by the project manager and the project team, it is important to understand the profile of the project, even within the same industry.

The IT industry has developed a set of project execution tools, methods and techniques that apply to a project profile that is most common in the IT Industry. Agile is the label that has emerged to describe this set of methods, tools and techniques. (more on Agile in later blogs)

Profiling project has been an interest of mine for over 20 years. I presented in first draft of a profiling method in the mid 1990s. I continue to develop my thought and will be publishing more later.

The Project Management Institute has a long and varied approach to profiling projects. The Project Management Institute Standards Committee chartered a Taxonomy Project with Gregory D. Githens as project manager (PMI, 1999). I served on this team and we provided a framework for classifying projects for the purpose of understanding and developing better methods of managing projects. The committee presumed that a greater understanding of projects was a necessary for developing improved project management approaches. The committee explored several different approaches to understand how projects are similar, and develop a method for classifying projects. Before our work was published things changed at PMI. During a reorganization of the Project Management Institute, the PMI Standards Committee was dissolved and replaced with a Standards Program and the Taxonomy Project was abandoned.

Later the Project Management Institute chartered research to study project categorization systems within organizational contexts (Crawford, Hobbs & Turner, 2002). This research resulted in a model for practitioner organizations to analyze and design a project categorization system. Crawford et al. (2002) stated that an organization adopting one of these project categorization systems would do so to identify the project management practices best suited to each of the different types of projects. Crawford also recommended that the Project Management Institute, despite the potential arbitrariness of a standard for categorizing projects, charter a project for establishing standards for project categorization. I recommended that PMI include the work on Crawford et al in the 5th Edition of the PMBOK. This suggestions was deferred for later consideration.

To my knowledge, PMI has not followed up on this research.

I will talk about profiling projects during later blogs because the is my special area of interest within project management.

Best
Russ

Crawford, L., Hobbs, J. B., & Turner, R. J. (2005). Project categorization systems: Aligning capability with strategy for better business results.  Newton Square, PA: Project Management Institute.