Project Management Roots and Understanding the PMBOK Guide

Nov 6, 2014

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Mastering Project, Program, and Portfolio Management: Models for Structuring and Executing the Project Hierarchy

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Discussion Questions

Briefly describe the term project management.
What does a project manager do?
Discuss the differences between ongoing operations and projects.
Is it a project if it doesn’t have a due date?
What competencies are important for a project manager to possess?
How/when did the project management discipline (or profession) begin?
What is a Process Group? How many are in the PMBOK Guide?
What is a Knowledge Area? How many are in the PMBOK Guide?
What is a Project Management Process? How many are in the PMBOK Guide?
Is the PMBOK Guide a process improvement methodology?
Which Process Group has the largest number of occurrences of Project Management Processes? Why might this be important?

Project Manager’s Perspective

I know of no other profession—with the possible exceptions of medical and legal—where caveats, assumptions, conditions, and so on are so critically important. Your leadership will usually not speak the “language” of program management, and just as the five-year-old who is promised, “Santa will bring you a pony...if you are good for the rest of the year,” senior managers sometimes only hear what they want to hear. So a wise and experienced project manager will learn to be explicit in the terms and conditions and requirements of the deliverables.

That was difficult for me to understand as I began my career as a project manager. Like many others in the 1970s and 1980s I was an “accidental” project manager, and it wasn’t a deliberate career or educational choice. My training in accounting gave me an intuitive understanding of schedules and timelines as an ideal state—much like the accounting profession’s budgets. And my understanding of schedules—just like budgets—was that the question wasn’t whether or not you’d miss the targets, but rather how much would you miss them by?

Accuracy is important, of course, but our crystal balls are often cloudy. One of my personal appreciation of project management tools like Symantec’s Timeline (early in my career, no longer available) and Microsoft’s Project (and many others) was the fact that the fresh, clean, optimistic, “best guess” project schedule was just that—a guess. An educated and experienced guess, but a guess nonetheless. I loved the file AFTER project completion. It was reality, full of mistakes and corrections and flawed assumptions and lessons learned for future projects. It was reality, and a really good postmortem of a detailed and accurate project schedule is as educational as any class I’ve ever taken. It can help you be a better project manager.

So from the trenches, my best advice is to realize that your project milestones and schedules are estimates, and they will slip. Make sure your leadership knows that, and also make sure they understand the conditions and requirements of your promised deliverables; that is, if X and Y are accomplished, Z will result. If not...

You come to examine project management at a special time. More and more leaders understand its place in helping them achieve goals and targets, and it’s being accepted, embraced even, across a wide variety of industries—medical, legal, financial, manufacturing, services, construction, engineering, software, and so on. Good luck and find a grizzled old project manager and listen to a few “war stories.” You’ll be glad you did.

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