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

John De La Howe School

Blog Post July 13, 2013

I have been supporting the Leadership Team of the John De La Howe School in developing their strategic plan. It has been an exciting process with a very dedicated and talented leadership team.

The team went through a very traditional strategy development process; analyzing the current environment, doing a force field analysis of the organizational strengths and weaknesses, reflecting on the organization’s mission and the refining their vision. Based on these conversations, the team developed the top strategic goals and identified team leaders to begin the process of chartering project teams.

The Leadership of John De Le Howe is engaged in strategy deployment through the use of strategic projects of PPM (portfolio project management). PPM is a trend among many leading organizations to accomplish strategic goals because of the focus, accountability and effectiveness of project management tools and techniques.

I am seeing more organizations use a more focused project approach in an environment where change is constant, speed is important and the environment is less predictable.

John De La Howe is an institution with a proud heritage that is facing challenges from multiple fronts. The School serves families and students with services that are both critical and very difficult to find. The current leadership team are exceptional people with dedication and talent to lead this institution and continue to provide leading edge services to children and families who are in desperate need.

I have been fortunate to be a small player within this organization’s journey and am grateful for the services they provide.

Russ