An Editorial Observation
We predict that the Project Management is going to change as little in the next 10 years as it has in the last 20. Oh, the project management "industry" will advance its knowledge and its products. And its numbers: Hoards of enthusiastic people will obtain some form of professional "certification".
We can hope for more standardization of nomenclature.. perhaps. And maybe even certifications that have some relationship to competence.But in practice, it's not going to change without a paradigm shift in management thinking. Unfortunately we don't see any factors - internal or external, rewards or consequences - that will precipitate such an order-of-magnitude leap in management awareness and commitment.
Providing an adequate structure and infrastructure for effective project management takes a significant awareness and commitment on the part of executive management. In today's One-minute Manager, sound-bite oriented corporate universe, managers won't take the time to understand the value of project management and the costs they pay for not doing it right. And they won't take it on faith. So long as that general attitude persists at the top of our corporations and bureaucracies, project management practice will continue to dither and sputter.
Just as in the past twenty years, some companies will commit to building a proper supporting structure and infrastructure. Some of them will see it through, far enough to see a payoff. Some won't. Other companies that have already made those commitments and had successes will succumb to "new broom", "clean sheet of paper", or "green" management approaches and pitch the baby right out with the bathwater. Again. Maybe for the third or fourteenth time.
The primary discussions in project management seminars and on internet forums are about the same problems introduced to in 1980 for the serious study of project management. Today's most common project breakers are the same ones as twenty years ago. They were already well understood and well documented at that time.
Today's Top Ten will still be the Top Ten ten years from now.
The upside to all this is that it will continue to keep lots of trainers and consultants gainfully employed. And it will keep the general employment levels up because of all the projects that have to be bailed out or done over. [Goodness, can you imagine the deflationary effect on our economies if we did it right the first time, more often than not?!!]
We can only leave you with the prediction that Martin Barnes the keynote speaker (1) for the 16th International Project Management Associations World Congress in Berlin last June that :
"If we want to maintain a profession of project managers in the future, we must make sure that the science keeps on developing. Best practice must always contain some really useful new things as will assuredly contain no old things. By ‘old’ things I mean things more than say ten years old. The old things will have sunk into the basic skills of all managers if not of all educated people. It is not a new idea that project management should be taught in schools from infancy. When that happens, everybody will have the basic skills. The only things which will sustain the profession will be useful novelties."
(1) A Long Term View of Project Management : Its Past and Its Likely Future"
Following on from our January 03 Editorial "A New Year Prediction" a notice about the Editorial was published on the Reforming Project Management Blog calling for comment. Here are some of the observations on our Editorial recently published in the Reforming Project Management Blog
"I received numerous replies to the posting Can the Reform of Project Management Succeed? Most were encouraging. Many came by e-mail; while others were the topic of Yahoo! Group discussions. Here are ten of the best quotes:Hal Macomber "