Project Management: at a tipping point?

My favourite cartoonist is Gary Larson. I am sure that those of you who are familiar with his?Far Side?series, which often put animals in a human context, would agree they are sometimes sublime. Those of you reading this who haven’t found the joy of Larson please check him out on the Web. The reason I am talking about Gary Larson whenever I am thinking about the future and tipping points, I am reminded of one of his cartoons which shows dinosaurs pointing and laughing at a small warm-blooded hedgehog-like creature while one of the dinosaurs is looking at a snow-flake drifting onto his claw .. subtle but powerful.

I have spent a lot of time together with Seven Consulting’s M.D., Gareth James, thinking about the future of Project Management. I promised in my last article that I would be posting a series of articles about what we are learning about possible futures but, given it is near Christmas, I will defer these articles until early 2023.

However, similar to the dinosaurs just before the Ice Age in Larson’s cartoon, we suspect that the world of business and IT project management is at a tipping point.?

I’ll detail why we are thinking this in the following articles but to set the scene I want to share an observation.??Warning! This will be a quick and hopefully not boring trip into the past .. well??.. my past to be specific.

I started in IT as a programmer in 1969 in the Australian Bureau of which in those days was one of the three major computer centres for all the Australian government. There was no role called project manager and the standard planning activities i.e. scheduling, costing etc were performed by Senior Programmers.??In 1973, after a couple of significant computer project disasters, the Audit Office recommended that the Australian Government adopt formal “project management”. As it turned out I had moved to the Public Service Board in a standards-type role and my team conducted the first 5-day Project Management Workshop for all government departments in 1974. The basic project management body of knowledge we used came from the UK and US governments.?

What we taught in those days would be very familiar to all project managers today. Gantt Charts, network schedule dependencies, estimation techniques, cost management, status reporting, stakeholder engagement (albeit crudely), people leadership and so on.?

On a side note, the PMI was formed in 1969 and in 1981 began to formalise project management bodies of knowledge which eventually were published as PMBOK 1 in 1996 (earlier versions were available as various white-papers).?The first PMBOK was almost identical to what we taught in the 1970’s.

The core technology used in the 1970’s was main-frames (tape drives, disc-drives came later) that filled entire basements and could process 1 million instructions per second. Today’s super-computers can achieve 500 petaflops/second (one thousand million million!). IT technology has evolved rapidly over at least 4 major generations since early centralised 1970 “big iron” to a cloud-based virtual organism.

This exponential growth rate of evolution in technology raises a very interesting question … how has project management evolved? Yet another related question also comes to mind … does project management even need to evolve???

Short answer to the first question is that there has been?very little?evolution in project management over 5 decades. Second answer, it has to evolve radically given the future advances in both technology and the organisational context.?

What about Agile some of you are asking???As we’ll argue in the following articles, Agile is not a revolution but a natural, and not so radical, evolution from many early attempts starting in the late 1980’s to address the short-comings of an over-bureaucratised water-fall model.??Further, the emergence of Agile has raised serious and, in many cases, unresolved questions around the potential conflict and confusion of roles of a Project Manager versus Product Owner, Scrum Master, ART engineer, self-organising teams and so on.

Obviously, we are not saying that prevailing project management practices haven’t worked … they clearly have.

What we believe is that accelerating advances in AI, digital technology, programming environments, social media, global uncertainty and so on are already enabling types of project, products and team dynamics that will challenge many existing beliefs and practices in project management .. a tipping point is here.

So, nothing too controversial to finish of 2022?:-).

I am sure that for most of us, 2022 was a very difficult and challenging year and I wish all those who follow my writings a safe, healthy and loving Christmas break and see you all in a better 2023.

Footnote

Oh! Gary Larson has requested that folks don’t put his cartoons on the Internet but for dog and or cat lovers please check out Google for??“What we say to dogs and what they hear” and its companion cartoon “What we say to cats and what they hear”.??As a person who shares his home with a dog and a cat … simply wonderful.