Can we kill the word "project"?

My apologies project managers, but it's time to lay your weapons down.  Put down your Gantt charts and project plans but it's time to work the way business operates these days.  We need conform to the market and the product direction, not the plan.

Throughout my career and even back to my college education, I've been classically trained to group tasks together, place dates on them and forecast when we'll be done.  Typically, the sum of the tasks didn't add up to a desirable date so like all good bad managers, we collapsed things so can make a date.  Then we would march on to this plan with the extremely flawed assumption: the plan is always right.

Recently, I had the opportunity to co-author our SDLC based on agile principles and a chance to make things right (or at least more right).  Rather than saying there would be no project charter or plan, we went a step further: the word "project" does not exist in our SDLC.

Why?  Why would we do such a thing?  We did it to fundamentally xshift thinking.  Success is not predicated on the project being right but on the product being right.  It's not the load up of tasks that define success but that we have a product that is a fit for the marketplace and is something we feel confident about.  By removing the word "project", we put people outside their comfort level and to think in terms of a software platform and initiatives to enhance that platform.

All too often in my career (either as consultant or tech manager), I have seen software projects spun up, built, delivered and then left to die a slow death until no one realizes how it was intended to operate in the first place.  Software projects were about people coming together temporarily and then abandoning what they had worked on, rather than building a platform that continuously evolves to serve the needs of the business or marketplace.

"Initiatives" sound a lot like "projects" but they are not synonymous (ironically fun is an antonym of project).  "Initiative" implies that we have an idea but don't know the end-state.  "Project" implies that we know the idea is right and we know the end state.  By taking "projects" out of the SDLC, it forced collaboration between product (i.e. "the business" - another dreaded term) and technology delivery teams to define what the end-state would be.

Did that mean project activities like planning, chasing down issues and documentation go away?  No, but it meant that people marching to a project plan was gone.  Initiatives still gathered higher level business valued features - but did not dictate the end-state upfront nor how to deliver them: that was still up to the teams responsible for delivery.  The removal of that project plan safety blanket was scary to a lot of people but they felt energized once they realized what that meant - everyone has responsibility and input into product delivery.

All of my posts are my opinion alone and do not reflect the opinion of American Express.