The Case for Professional Project Management
It is commonly accepted that hiring a Certified Public Accountant is sound business practice. Why? Most companies have college trained accountants to handle their books. The basic elements of bookkeeping are taught in high school. Yet most enterprises as they grow and become more complex will quickly add a certified public accounting firm to their necessary expenses to properly manage their business.
We all recognize the value of a 3rd party audit. They help to discover fraud, to certify accurate information to stakeholders and to satisfy governing jurisdictions that your tax payments are proper. Publicly traded companies are required by law to hire these services. This is a sound business management practice for both the large and for the small business. So, no one hesitates to bring in the professional accountant. Yet, the same mentality does not translate to project management. Why?
Let me first say that this aversion to project management is not true of all industries. Certain industries have long recognized the need for highly trained and certified project managers. No one would dream of embarking on a large construction project without a certified PM. Even a person building a home in most cases will hire a General Contractor who is primarily a project manager to run that project for them. Only the bravestamongst us will venture to be our own general contractor.
Why is that? It is very simple: People know they don’t have the time, or understand the complex relationships between activities, to do to a good job. Even more, they recognize that they don’t have the clout to get the sub contractors to show up when it is time for them to do their part. They would much rather leave all that to a professional who has the skills and knowledge to get the job done. And best of all they only have one throat to choke if something goes wrong.
Film making is another industry that has long accepted the need for professional project managers. The director has the primary responsibility for creating a film. Yet there are literally hundreds of people and thousands of activities that must all come together to produce a successful shoot for even the simplest of films. Timing is critical as every hour can costs tens even hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Props must be prepared, camera crews deployed, makeup artists, actors, stage hands, caterers, security, special effects, costumes, etc. etc. etc. all must be working in concert for everything to go right. But the Director would never consider trying to coordinate all of these themselves.
Again, the reason is quite simple: The director must focus on the creative aspect of making the film. This must consume their every thought. They would literally go out of their minds if they had to worry about all the details that go into a shoot. In today’s modern film industry the project manager is the director’s right hand man. The larger films will have several project managers. And everyone on the set understands that they report to the project manager.
So, why does the average business today not have the same mindset as film making and construction? Why will you find so few professional project managers in the average business, especially in the small to midsize company? You may find many people with project management titles but are they trained in all the aspects of sound project management methodology?
In my experience, project management ends up falling on the line of business manager. They are expected to run several strategic initiatives while they handle their full time job of day to day operations. The view is that project management is no different than general management; that the two jobs require the same skill sets of leadership, organization, planning and communication. While this is true to a point, project management involves so much more.
We need to start with the fundamental difference between operations and projects. Projects are one-time events while operations are repeated events. Project resources often have primary responsibilities that take precedence to their projects while operational resources are 100% allocated to that work. Projects have esoteric or difficult to measure goals, operations have very measurable weekly or monthly metrics. Projects often venture into uncharted waters while operations have a known path.
These fundamental differences require additional skills and different capabilities than a business manager. A Project Manager must have unique skills in estimating effort and identifying risk. They must be adept at leading resources who don’t report to them, who may not even work for their organization. They must be able to coordinate and communicate to a team who may have never worked together before. They have to manage the expectations of not only the sponsor but every stakeholder who is impacted by the project.
When a business manager is assigned a project it is most often because they have expert knowledge in the primary focus of the project. Their bent will be to approach the project like they do their daily operations. They will not consider the unique needs of project management and therefore will make the classic project management mistakes of inadequate planning and risk analyses, inadequate definition of the goals and objectives, and inadequate stake-holder analyses. Any one of these inadequacies can result in a failed project; taken together they almost guarantee it.
So, what are the reasons organizations shy away from or don’t even consider professional project managers for meeting their objectives? I find the answers typically fall into one of the three following categories.
- Our projects are too small to warrant professional PMs
- We can’t afford a professional PM
- We don’t want to lose our entrepreneurial spirit
In part 2 we will address these three objections.
Part 2 - Overcoming the Professional PM Objections
Part 3 - Professional Project Management as a Service