In the Taxi with Abe by Kristel Wills via Flickr

By Thornton May
Futurist, Senior Advisor with GP, Executive Director & Dean - IT Leadership Academy

In contemporary culture today, attention, as measured by column-inches and sound bites, elevates hackers, terrorists, mis-behaving divas, twenty-something billionaires and done-something-wrong sports heroes as “persons of interest.”  The media pattern today obsessively celebrates creators of disorder. Little remarked upon – in fact essentially invisible to mainstream consciousness are the creators of order – people who get things done, people who move the ball forward in the face of uncertainty. I would like to reintroduce you to a true hero in our complex world – the project manager.

One of the top analysts at a respected subscription research firm believes that the discipline of project management suffers from project purpose amnesia. This analyst argues that project managers are so obsessed with tools and processes that they have lost sight of the true purposes of project management – “ensuring the project actually solved the problem/delivered the value it was supposed to when it was chartered.” Other observers believe that project management and project managers are our best hope for resolving the myriad of complex challenges facing contemporary organizations. During the last two quarters I have, via a series of time-boxed and highly provocative exercises examined the current state of project management.

Project Management is Mis-Labeled
In 1995, the Standish Group became the authoritative source of truth regarding project success rates. In 1995 roughly one-in-six projects succeeded. Today the Standish groups estimates roughly one-in-three projects are successful.  [Source: http://goo.gl/X9GE5H]

In this column I have repeatedly gone on my soapbox declaiming that “leadership” & “management” ARE NOT synonyms. “Management” is “getting there.” “Leadership” is deciding where “there” is. I believe the reason so many projects fail to deliver to expectation is that at project inception “expectations” were not known. All that was known was that the status quo was broken. We should change the name of the discipline from “project management” [i.e., getting to a known endpoint] to project leadership [creating consensus regarding what that endpoint actually is]. A taxi driver cannot be successful if the passenger does not know where they are going.

Don’t Know That They Don’t Know
Many organizations have a fairly immature approach to project management. It is assumed that this is a core competency of the enterprise. Typically it is not.

Which Team is the Project Manager Really Playing For?
At just about any gathering of project managers one will hear someone say, “I am a project manager, but first and foremost I work for IT.” Who does the project manager really work for? Are they organizationally agnostic – true value citizens committed not to a given department but to the success of the project?

Project management is an enterprise core competency which deserves our attention and respect.