Reinventing Project Management

In this article, I want to talk about the need for “Reinventing Project Management”. Any dynamic organization or company needs to be constantly evolving to keep pace with a rapidly changing marketplace and competitive environment. My favorite example of that is American Express. American Express started their business in the 1800’s delivering packages on railway trains. They were essentially the “Federal Express of that day”.

As time went on, the need to adopt a different business model became more-and-more evident and American Express gave up the railway express business and evolved into the financial services company that it is today.

The need for “reinvention” is certainly true of the project management profession. The basic approach for doing traditional plan-driven project management hasn’t changed significantly since the 1950’s and 1960’s and that has been heavily impacted by the influence of Agile.

• The impact of Agile calls for reinventing what “project management” is in a much broader perspective based on a more integrated project management approach that is focused on delivering value to the customer.
• This new approach should embrace Agile as well as traditional plan-driven project management in whatever proportions are needed to deliver value to the customer. It requires some fairly radical changes in people’s mindset of what “project management” is.
• Small incremental changes probably will not work.

The approach that is needed is similar to the “reengineering” approach that was very popular in the 1990’s where companies and organizations were forced to reinvent themselves to survive.

What is “Reengineering”?

“Reengineering” became very popular in the early 1990’s. The essence of the reengineering movement was that sometimes an incremental approach to process improvement isn’t sufficient. Sometimes you need to almost completely disregard the way the existing process works and use out-of-the-box thinking to explore completely different ways of doing things. As an example:

• In those days, many retail stores relied on large networks of distribution warehouses to supply product to all of their retail store locations.
• Many manufacturers used a similar system to stock inventory in warehouses to support their production operations.

That was a well-established way of doing logistics at that time, but it wasn’t very efficient and effective. It consumed huge amounts of inventory sitting in warehouses unnecessarily and a lot of unnecessary warehouse space. The concept of overall supply chain management and “Just-in-Time” production changed all that:

• Instead of stockpiling lots of inventory in distribution warehouses to support their retail stores, many retailers learned to eliminate the distribution warehouses altogether by having manufacturers deliver products direct to their stores on a just-in-time basis to meet customer demand.
• Retailers eliminated huge amounts of inventory that they were carrying by eliminating the inventory that was being held in distribution warehouses.
• Manufacturers used a similar just-in-time concept to eliminate or minimize the parts inventory that they were carrying from their suppliers.

This required some fairly radical, out-of-the-box thinking to reengineer these processes in a completely different way rather than simply continuing to tweak and improve the current processes. It also required a lot of joint collaboration between manufacturers and retailers as well as manufactures and suppliers to develop this new approach. The essence of this created a new focus on “supply chain management”.

Paving Cow Paths

Michael Hammer who was one of the leaders of the reengineering movement in those days came up with an expression of “paving the cow paths” to refer to efforts that were popular at that time to simply automate processes that were fundamentally ineffective or broken. Here’s what he said about that:

“But speeding up those processes cannot address their fundamental performance deficiencies. Many of our job designs, work flows, control mechanisms, and organizational structures came of age in a different competitive environment and before the advent of the computer. They are geared toward efficiency and control. Yet the watchwords of the new decade are innovation and speed, service and quality.”
“The usual methods for boosting performance—process rationalization and automation—haven’t yielded the dramatic improvements companies need. In particular, heavy investments in information technology have delivered disappointing results—largely because companies tend to use technology to mechanize old ways of doing business. They leave the existing processes intact and use computers simply to speed them up.”
“It is time to stop paving the cow paths. Instead of embedding outdated processes in silicon and software, we should obliterate them and start over. We should “reengineer” our businesses: use the power of modern information technology to radically redesign our business processes in order to achieve dramatic improvements in their performance.”

“Reengineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate”, Michael Hammer, https://hbr.org/1990/07/reengineering-work-dont-automate-obliterate

What Happened to the Reengineering Movement?

Like many things, the reengineering movement took on a life of its own where:

• The emphasis shifted to a brute-force approach for slashing and burning existing organizations, laying off people, and radical downsizing.
• In some cases, it went too far and resulted in “throwing out the baby with the bath water”. In other words, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.

As a result, the reengineering movement fell out of favor with many people who began to associate it with just a brute-force way to reorganize and downsize existing companies. That’s unfortunate because the fundamental concept behind reengineering of using out-of-the-box thinking to come up with new and innovative approaches to perform many existing processes was very sound.

How Does This Apply to Project Management?

Many people in the project management community think that there is only one way of doing project management and that is based on a well-established, traditional plan-driven approach that emphasizes planning and control to achieve predictability over project costs and schedules.

• That plan-driven approach to project management has been the fundamental way that project management has been done for many years and it has become so well-established that it defines the essence of what “project management” is and is difficult to change.
• Much of the current emphasis in the project management community has been on using automation and tools such as AI to improve the efficiency of the way that process works. There’s an insufficient level of emphasis on changing the very nature of how project management is done. That’s what Michael Hammer referred to as ‘paving cow paths”.

Don’t Throw the Baby Out with the Bath Water

I’m not advocating completely throwing away the traditional plan-driven approach that has been so fundamental to project management for a long time, but it clearly is not the only way to do project management.

• In situations where there is a relatively low level of uncertainty, requirements are well-defined, and predictability of costs and schedules is important; a traditional plan-driven approach clearly has value and should continue to be the primary project management approach. A good example of that is the construction industry.
• However, that approach should not be the only way to do project management and force-fitting all projects to that approach is certainly not optimal.

Why is a Different Approach Needed?

A different approach is needed where any of the following conditions exist:

1. There is a high level of uncertainty in the project that makes it difficult or impossible to define detailed requirements prior to the start of the project and the general level of uncertainty in the environment has increased due to the increased complexity of solutions and other factors.
2. It requires creativity and innovation to optimize the business value of the solution, and the business value of the solution is more important than meeting arbitrary cost and schedule goals.
3. It is important to the organization to have a sufficient level of adaptivity and flexibility in their project management approach to dynamically adjust to a competitive business environment.

As I’ve emphasized many times, this is not a black-and-white, all-or-nothing choice between a traditional plan-driven approach to project management and an Agile approach. The idea that there is a binary and mutually exclusive choice between those two extremes with nothing in between is what is called a “false dichotomy”. A “false dichotomy” creates the notion that there are only two choices and excludes the possibility of a hybrid of the two approaches. In many cases, it is a matter of focusing on the value that the project needs to produce and using an appropriate project management approach that is well-suited to delivering that value and that may require blending the two approaches in the right proportions to fit the situation.

What Is the Impact?

What Does This Mean for Project Managers?

Project Managers need to focus on delivering value rather than simply managing and executing a well-defined project management process to achieve cost and schedule goals. However, the idea of “value” may not be well-defined and there’s no standardized, “cookbook” approach that works in all situations for delivering value. As a result, Project Managers need to be well-aligned with the business environment that they operate in and must be capable of making decisions of what the best approach is to optimize the business value of a solution in that environment. This means that:

• The Project Manager role might begin to look more like a Program Manager role where a Program Manager is responsible for broad-based business initiatives that may not be well-defined.
• It also may begin to look like an Agile Product Owner role who makes business decisions to define and prioritize the work being done, provides business direction to the team, and reviews the results of the work against the business value it is meant to achieve.
• The role of a Project Manager may be more heavily associated with larger and more complex enterprise-level projects rather than small, simple single-team projects.

This raises the bar for project managers to a new level that goes beyond simply managing and executing a well-defined project management process to achieve predictability over the project costs and schedules. In this environment, the Project Manager needs to take a much more active decision-making role in shaping the direction of the project to optimize the business value that it produces. This approach is what I call “Value-driven Project Management“.

What Does This Mean to the Project Management Institute (PMI®)?

This kind of radical change won’t come about without strong leadership and the most logical place for that leadership to come from is PMI. PMI needs to provide strong leadership by communicating a clear vision of the future of an integrated approach to project management and updating existing project management professional certifications as necessary to reflect this shift in the direction of the project management profession. That should include:

• Developing a much clearer vision of the roles that an Agile Project Manager might play in this new environment,
• Communicating that vision to project managers, and
• Updating certifications to reflect the skills and qualifications needed to play those roles.

PMI has taken steps in that direction but the changes to date don’t go far enough:

• Some Agile content has been added to the PMP® certification exam, but the primary focus of the exam is still on traditional plan-driven project management
• The PMI-ACP® exam content has recently been updated; however, it is still based only on just a general understanding of Lean and Agile.
• The role that an Agile Project Manager might play is still not defined and neither of these certifications are based on specific skills and qualifications a project manager might need to play those roles.

A possible approach to this is to:

• Keep the current level of focus in the PMP exam and continue to focus it primarily on traditional plan-driven project management with some level of awareness of Agile
• Evolve the current PMI-ACP certification exam to provide much more substantive content on the skills and qualifications needed to perform an Agile Project Management role. That approach might involve:
  • Keeping the current PMI-ACP certification exam as a general foundation (similar to what CAPM for traditional plan-driven project management)
  • Developing a more advanced version of PMI-ACP that goes beyond the original PMI-ACP exam and focuses on substantive skills and qualifications to play an Agile Project Management role.

More Details

A reviewer of this article thought it would be useful to provide more detail on how a hybrid Agile Project Management process would work and what impact it would have on project managers to implement it. I’ve written a separate article on that here:

What’s the Impact of an Agile Project Management Approach?

Overall Summary

We need to use the same concepts that were used for reengineering business processes to reinvent what “project management” is and develop a new and broader approach that is designed to focus on producing business value. I call this approach, “Value-driven Project Management” as opposed to “Plan-driven Project Management”.

This requires some out-of-the-box thinking to view Project Management in a whole new perspective that will change the very nature of what we have known as “project management”. However, we need to be careful not to “throw the baby out with the bath water”. The traditional plan-driven approach to project management does have value and it is not a matter of completely throwing out that approach.

• It’s a matter of recognizing the limitations in that approach and that it is not the only way to do project management, and
• Developing a new hybrid approach with a focus on delivering business value that integrates a plan-driven approach with Agile in the right proportions to fit any given situation