A new IBM research report suggests that the best analogies for businesses in the future may no longer be the command structures of the military but the self-organising networks found in nature: schools of fish, flocks of birds and swarms of insects. This research, contained in The IBM Global Innovation Outlook 2.0 Report, reinforces Bioteam rule 10: Self-Organising Networks.
~ IBM’s Global Innovation Outlook
Imagine if core business skills and practices such as “time management” became professions unto themselves. You’d pay dues to the Time Management Institute, where you’d be credentialed as a Certified Time Manager; you’d be hired for your Time Management skills as a Level 4 Time Manager, and use only company-approved Time Management forms and templates. On every team there would have to be a designated Time Manager (certified and experienced, of course), and you would attend large “TM” conferences around the world.
Maybe Time Management is a skills and practice that is deserving of professional status give the fast pace of corporate life, but you get a sense from the example above that there is a tinge of absurdity to it. Time management, you might say, is certainly one of the core skills we use in business and government, but somehow having a formalized Time Management department and role is overkill. Why use a specialist for a skill that all business generalists should be practicing? There’s no question that someone whose profession is all about time management might have a better grasp of the issues, challenges and solutions around it, but do we really need someone who’s only real function is to be an advisor, consultant and documentation-keeper?
I have similar questions around the formalization of Project Management over the last 20 years or so. Disclaimer: I’m a member of the Project Management Institute, and I’ve had to use project management techniques in my work as a Web manager and Web strategist. Note that I said I’ve used project management techniques, not Project Management. I’m not a certified Project Manager, though I have taken Project Management courses. In other words, I’m not one of the clergy, I’m just a layman who occasionally dons the robes to help the priests carry out the ritual liturgy.
Project Management was originally developed by people like Henry Gantt, and used by the Army Corps of Engineers in the first half of the 20th century for wartime and peacetime projects, such as building ships, dams, bridges and other structures. Engineers being the breed they are, project management as a discipline was carried into the world of technology and computer software, where it became widely popularized in the ’70s through ’90s as the role of technology became more and more essential to the world of business. The Project Management Institute itself was only formed in 1969, even though something like “Project Management” had been around since the first World War.
As an experienced Web architect and Web manager, I’ve seen how project management skills can provide an excellent framework for a Web design project, while Project Management proper can sometimes be a stifling, counter-intuitive nemesis to achieving effective results in usability and design. In many ways, Project Management, the discipline, has evolved into Project Management, the orthodoxy. The kind of dogma that Project Management professionals try to impose upon Web and other technology projects can result in Webs and Web services that are out of touch with the fast-paced Web 2.0 and 3.0 world we live in. Sometimes more effort is expended in documentation of project steps in overly-detailed MS Project charts and sundry PM templates than what the end product is worth in usability and creative design.
The fact is that the people who pay for expensive Web and other technology projects, the business stakeholders, owners, executives and investors, don’t really care about how you get there, but rather, what you’ve achieved when you finally get there. While some business executives pay lip service to the importance of “process” and “project discipline”, most of them also demand the right to circumvent those same sacrosanct processes and disciplines, not just occasionally but frequently, and this veto process often happens informally down the chain of command as well, as stakeholders in management positions lobby their executives to command changes to their projects. Project scope, timelines, even work breakdown structure — everything held in order with command-and-control protocols by PMs — are routinely tossed aside by the often subjective requirements of executives.
That’s okay. It’s just the way things are, and always have been. But the disciples of Project Management live in a fantasy command-and-control universe where scope creep is blasphemy, changes are “managed” (if only we lived in a universe where changes could be managed!) and dates on an MS Project Gannt chart are as constant to Project Managers as the constellations in the sky are to ocean navigators. Like litigators or medieval theologians, fastidiously detailed volumes of documentation are poured out, digitally and printerly, even though most “resources” assigned to a project and the project sponsors themselves never have time to read more than 5% of it because they’re too busy doing the actual work.
Actual work. If you’re someone who’s doing the actual work (that stuff they try to itemize line by painstaking line in the Work Breakdown Structures), you’ll find you don’t really have time to do a lot of the onerous documentation work that constitutes almost 50% of everything Project Managers do. The other 50% is mostly taken up by frequent meetings with people who are either doing the project or making the decisions about the project. Purely speaking, a real Project Manager doesn’t also act as a “resource”; their sole function is to manage the flow and output of project details, timelines and deliverables.
Now we come to the mythical Ouroboros seen in the above woodcut, and explained in this verse from Plato’s Timaeus:
“It had no need of eyes, for there was nothing outside it to be seen; nor of ears, for there was nothing outside to be heard. There was no surrounding air to be breathed, nor was it in need of any organ by which to supply itself with food or to get rid of it when digested. Nothing went out from or came into it anywhere, for there was nothing. Of design it was made thus, its own waste providing its own food, acting and being acted upon entirely with and by itself, because its designer considered that a being which was sufficient unto itself would be far more excellent than one which depended upon anything.”
Has Project Management become a 21st century Ouroboros — a self-contained, self-referential and self-serving demi-profession whose practitioners have a vested interest in promoting PM mystique, building Project Management Office kingdoms, and harnessing business operations to their processes like oxen harnessed to a wagon? IMO, those who are creating Web services and building Web sites are well aware that projects have to be defined, resources have to be allotted, milestones have to be achieved, and deliverables have to be delivered. In the “old world”, before the Internet was popularized and digital technology was dominant, creative agencies such as ad firms, television production companies and record producers also had to channel creative projects through business requirements, and did so quite successfully through their own fluid processes without having a “Project Manager” in-house.
Back to my own experience…I use some Project Management techniques in my work, but usually in unorthodox ways. I don’t like Microsoft Project, for example, which is just a glorified spreadsheet with a few graphical enhancements. And I like some Project Management tools and templates, but only if I can customize them for specific projects. As for things like scope, it’s always easy to illustrate to project sponsors that they can expand scope all they want, as long as they can also expand budget and resources accordingly. As for deliverables, that’s often more a product of good communications and technical writing skills than “Project Management” rigor. If you’re working on a creative project, be it software or Webware, why spend all your time and effort documenting and tracking a project rather than allowing project dynamics to evolve and project “bioteams” to self-organize through hard work, good communications and creative thinking?
But that’s another topic for another day. Those who want to break out of the 20th century Project Management mold into a new way of managing projects in the 21st century would do well to investigate some of the principles behind self-organization, such as the Chaordic concept pioneered by Visa founder Dee Hock in the 1960s and 1970s when he was head of Visa International (visit the Chaordic Initiatives site or the Chaordic Commons site for more information). Or you can enlighten yourself and your organization with the ideas found in The Bioteaming Manifesto or in Ken Thompson’s fascinating blog on bioteaming, The Bumble Bee.