Traditional Project Manager Again?

 

Traditional Project Management

I am a traditional project manager. This is a statement that seems to draw weird looks. Something like declaring the “I belong to the old school”.

I was pursing the PMI website and read about Christophe Midler was recently awarded the PMI Research Achievement Award. I went and downloaded his research paper from the PMI Research Conference in 2000. Project Management for Intensive Innovation Based Strategies: New Challenges for the 21^st Century.

In his paper, Midler stated that traditional project management did not provide the processes needed for innovative projects. I am over simplifying his statement but his characterization of traditional project management still paints a picture of project management as a stagnant grounded in the processes of the construction and similar industries.

Project management is an evolving profession adjusting methods, knowledge, processes and skills needed to apply to a growing number of industries that value the benefits of project management. Every project still needs a scope, budget, schedule, risk analysis, and closeouts processes to name a few. Every project also needs to customize these processes based on the profile of the project.

Traditional project managers manage the scope, budget, schedule and risk. If you are using new tools and processes, that is great. We need to be developing new tools and processes and we need to develop research techniques to better understand the effective of these tools. We also need to develop research techniques that allow us to better understand the appropriate project profiles that will benefit from these new tools.

By labeling the baseline processes of project management as traditional and not applicable to new project profiles is doing a disservice to our profession and stymieing the research we need to be doing.

Russ