Book Notes: “Project Management for the Unofficial Project Manager” (Takeaway #8)

This is a good one! It’s the main reason I believe Projects fail…

Here is my takeaway #8 from one of the most useful practical books in my field, “Project Management for the Unofficial Project Manager”:

8) “Before we go any further, let’s understand why projects fail. According to the PMI, organizations with few formal project management processes in place (…low maturity organizations) are far more likely to experience project failure than companies that follow a process.”

Note: This comes from Chapter 1 “The New World of ‘Unofficial’ Project Management” (page 8)

Let me say this, if your Policies, Processes, and Procedures are not written down you have no standard of excellence. Without standard operations you should at least have a standard project management approach and it should be documented too. Start by writing your first Project Charter. Map it out project by project!

I have also been specifically posting about Organizational Management, Change Management, and Project Management Maturity levels (on a 1-5 scale), because when a business takes responsibility to bridge its behavioral gaps it will go from surviving to thriving…one project at a time.

The book proceeds to list “the most common reasons for failure that we hear about”, but I won’t list them here (See page 9).

Many factors listed are beyond your control as Project Manager and depend largely on organizational support, understanding, and actions. You could say it takes a whole tribe/village to successfully raise an organizational project. But do your best to learn from failed projects, to train your team, and your organization and hopefully things will turn around. One thing is for sure, you can’t expect to do the same thing again and again, organizationally or otherwise, and expect different results.

Story time: One person who stands out to me as I further create my own business online and launch it in this new direction is someone on LinkedIn who is just 16 years old and just started creating his own business. He is a little ahead of me on the journey of posting things of business value every day, so I have learned some things from him. I am a decent long format writer, for example, and did manage to publish a novel, but I am still learning how to write short posts on LinkedIn because publishing books doesn't pay the bills. This young man writes better than me when it comes to posts.

I try to make it a point to like and comment on his posts. You can see he is thoughtfully considering how to approach this new world of work as it continues to evolve. You can see he is setting up systems and processes to learn and adapt his approach. You can see he is growing as we all are. And yes, with more experience will come more understanding and further maturation of processes and business itself.

Naturally, I like forming a community and learning from one another anyway. I support what he is doing. I would like to see efforts of anyone working to offer the business world anything of value rewarded. I hope his Vision for his career and future business opportunities receives the benefits he hopes for one way or another. Even if building his network in his areas of interest, building his product offering, and building his brand does not lead to a sustainable one-person business, I believe it will lead to being a valuable resource in a good company at some point.

My advice is don’t jump into just any job, if you can afford to not settle just yet. Interview companies as much as they are interviewing you. Ask the organization about the maturity of its processes and determine if it is continuing to learn and progress its processes and its maturity. Make sure organizations do not just have a friendly culture, but a maturing one that is organized well and has structure, governance, and maturing processes that support both business and project management. Make sure it works together toward the same objectives of both professional development and business advancement. You might ask for an example of how they are developing professionals to advance in their profession and advance the business, including what they want that your desired position should grow toward (albeit that might depend on building around your unique offering if they have some leeway to do so)? Maturity is not necessarily measured in years of existence or knowledge, but rather what you do with past experience to approach future needs.

Note: What is of real importance is not if a company has all of its processes figured out. They don't! A real mature company knows that improvement is a continual process. It is not about the size of the company either, it is about the maturity of its systems to gain more experience, progress its way of work, and refine its approach to meet business needs. In other words, it looks ahead for what it wants to become and has the change project management structure and organization in place (scaled accordingly) to pivot as needed and line up and pursue next steps to get where it wants to be It has well-established project management best practices that give employees opportunities to lead and develop professionally, which also leads to operational process improvements. Better processes improve the work for its main asset - its people. (Look for more valuable posts and products to come from me on this subject).

My next article post (tomorrow…same time same place) will focus on what we can learn from successful projects…

Sneak Peek: The winning formula for projects is PEOPLE + PROCESS = SUCCESS

Note: This article was originally published as a blog post on the Storyboard PM website.