Continued discussion of Silvious et al’s book on Project Management and Sustainability

Continued discussion of Silvious et al’s book on Project Management and Sustainability

Sustainability in Project Management, 2012

Silvius, G.,Schipper, R., Planko, J., Brink, J., Kohler, A.

Gower Publishing Limited, Surry, England

 

In the second chapter of Sustainability in Project Management, the authors view the development of project management in stages. There was some early form of project management that must have existed in the earliest eras of civilization that accounts for massive projects like the Egyptian Pyramids. The discipline of project management emerged during the 1950s and has been refined with the development of new tools, processes and skills. The authors also stated that as the economy and organizations become more complex, traditional project management does not have the processes, and traditional project managers do not have the skills to successfully manage the new project environment. It is time to develop a modern project management approaches to meet the new requirements.

Research and general observation provides strong evidence that changes in the project environment do require tools and processes to better understand the project, and develop an appropriate execution approach. The approach of the authors to divide project management approaches into traditional project management (that is becoming increasing inadequate), and some form of new project management is problematic. This belief assumes you can define some project management tools and processes as traditional, and yet the authors do not attempt to define traditional project management other than list the tools used to manage project where the scope and project deliverables are not well defined at the beginning of the project.

This view of traditional project and modern project management creates a dichotomous view of projects.  Projects are either traditional or some form of modern project. This approach implies that tools and processes used successfully in the past are inappropriate, or at least insufficient for modern projects. I believe this is a limited view of project management and inhibits our ability to develop greater understanding of projects. An alternative approach focuses on creating a profile of the project and developing the appropriate tools, techniques and skills for that project profile. As I have discussed in other blogs, developing a project profile and appropriate execution approach would serve the authors as a better model for defining and discussing sustainability in project management than the model of traditional versus modern project management. In forthcoming blogs, I will reflect on the role of project management and sustainability.

Russ