Why everyone should learn how to manage projects

I love projects. It’s what I’ve done for most of my career. Even when I was a CEO, I was CEO of a project management consultancy, I still saw my job as delivering projects. I love creating something from nothing, from binding teams together to be more than they knew, from improving organisational outcomes. It’s all a big rush and fills my cup every day.

So I’m a big fan.

Irrespective, I think project management is a discipline that everyone should go through.

Everything is a project

I ponder whether I see everything as a project because I’m in the field of project management. Is this a case of everything is a nail because all I have is a hammer? I’m still pondering.

But as I look around organisations, I see the big and small things they are doing, and they all look like projects to me. The Christmas parties, The layoffs and the hiring, the webinar for the new year, improving the economy, building a brand, creating new features and value for customers, they all look like projects.

But they don’t all have Project Managers on them. How differently would all these activities deliver, if the people responsible for delivering them had a background in project management?

Knowledge would strengthen governance

I must have been involved in 100+ different governance committees in my career. I spent a stint as an outside observer on several governance committees, helping them become stronger and more accountable. Of all those committees I’ve been involved in, none of them challenged nearly enough.

I believe if the people who sat on these committees had managed projects themselves, they would know how to challenge better. The responsibility to govern the decisions on the project is OK from most committees. Not stellar, but OK. The responsibility to ensure the project is being well managed is almost always missing from those committees, even when it’s expressly listed in their terms of reference.

A stronger layer of governance would give projects better results. There would be more support for project managers and fewer places to hide.

Knowledge would strengthen outcomes

I spend too much time educating stakeholders and sponsors that a project cannot be accountable for the benefit and that a project is not about managing the process and delivering outputs. A project is about outcomes.

I believe if stakeholders and sponsors had spent some time managing projects, they would apply a different lens to the projects they are involved in. And they’d stop the silly requests to “just add this scope item in whilst we’re here”.

The problem is, our careers are like a wine tasting at Margrain Vineyard… we can only go forwards. If you skip a bottle (a skill) and want to go backwards later to taste it (add it in to your repertoire) - you can’t. You can’t ask a CPO to go an manage a project for a couple of years to gain some additional skills. And you can’t ask Kate at Margrain to go back and try the Chardonnay that you skipped - she won’t let you. We have to start at the start.

I’d love to find an organisation that requires all future managers above a certain level to have spent a minimum number of years managing projects. Does anyone know one?