Myths in Project Management

I finished a book on a recent business trip. When They Separated Earth from Sky: How the Human Mind Shapes Myth, Barber, Princeton University Press, 2004.

The book defines four major categories of myth:

• Silence - what everyone is expected to know already but is not explained in so many words
• Restructuring—When there is a significant cultural change, at least some patterns will be restructured or reinterpreted. Successive changes will render the pattern's form ununderstandable. A matter of logic becomes a matter of faith.
• Analogy - the conjecture that if any entities or phenomena bear "some" resemblance in any aspect they must be related.
• Compression - crunch information and move it to the future

Some Myths of Project Management

The myth starts when a non-literate society winnows out and compresses key information to fit into human memory. There are several myths about project management in today's environment.

• The past has come to be seen as different in an absolute sense from the present. This myth is called the Golden Age Phenomenon,?or, in the case of project management or software development methods, the inverse of the Golden Age. "In the past, things were poorly managed. In the present, we have much better methods." The present provides solutions to software development and project management projects in ways the past never did.
• CMMI is a heavy-weight process based on mistrust and overcontrol. This myth is based mostly on the inexperience of those "selling" the agile development process. Some of the most ardent critics of CMMI have never worked in a CMMI-based business or participated in a CMMI assessment process. They have strong opinions about why CMMI is somehow evil without understanding that CMMI is a MATURITY ASSESSMENT process, not a software development methodology.
• Variance-based project management is the cornerstone of success. The PMBOK processes focus on the measurement and control of variance. This "paradigm" is the foundation of many project management methodologies.