I recently attended a Project Management Symposium hosted by the University of Texas at Dallas. The keynote speakers were concerned with large construction projects; the LBJ Expressway, Panama Canal and UTD building initiatives. I am not sure that software project management has too much in common with large building projects but it was still an excellent conference. I did have a couple of key points that I would like to discuss.
The first major take away is the importance of communication. I often find that the vast majority of business professionals are terrible communicators. It's not that they don't understand grammar, although many do have difficulty with basic tenets of the English language. My point is that that most professionals don't know how to communicate effectively. They often use the wrong medium to send the wrong message to the wrong people. Many times I see an inflammatory e-mail sent to a large number of people that should have been communicated by phone, or better yet, face to face. Their original message becomes lost in the inflammatory e-mail. Unfortunately, these messages are circulated around another dozen times. Additionally, I have seen minor issues escalate to major confrontations when both parties avoid communication and use e-mail to express their discontent. The symposium had a couple of excellent sessions on social media and how to use it for project management. Another breakout session discussed communication media amoung the generations. According to the speaker, ggeneration X & Y are internet natives while the Baby Boomers and Silent Generation are not naturally comfortable with electronic media. This observation can change the way in which communication is handled.
The other major item that caused me to ponder is the role of the deidcated vs. part time role of the project manager. I see this topic appear from time to time on the LinkedIn discussions. The project management community promotes the use of the dedicated project manager in organizations. In a perfect world, I totally agree. However, most organizations seem to lump project management in with department managers or with senior technical leads. We had an excellent session on the role of the technical or hybrid project manager. It was a hotly discussed item as to whether a technical staff member can perform project management duties. In my experience, the answer is yes. In fact, I believe that project management occurs at many levels of an organization. The part-time project management phenomenon occurs for two major reasons; organizations are not aware of the projectized strcture and project management skills are often an assumed skill set (much like written and verbal communication skills). As with most assumptions, these are often wrong and can lead to disastrous consequences.
I am a big fan of PMI and I believe that both full-time and part-time/hybrid project managers should invest training time and dollars in the PMI program. At the very least, PMI provides a common structure and lnguage on "how to get things done".
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