All White-Collar Work Today Is Project Work
Whereas the Industrial Revolution emphasized skill and task specialization, the current information revolution is generating greater task complexity, which demands the integration of a diverse set of skills. In the mid-1990s, such demands led to the use of the project method as the predominant management strategy for structuring organizations and defining the roles and tasks of mid-level managers [1, 2].
Projects are defined as temporary endeavors undertaken to create a unique product or service. A project may be as simple as the plan for an off-site retreat or as complex as the development and production of a space shuttle. In the project method, instead of people being grouped in the traditional functional units based on common means (skills, work processes, or knowledge), they are grouped in cross-functional units based on the projectās goals . The project culture, which fosters responsiveness to customers, has enabled organizations to easily migrate from the producer-dominated market of yesterday to the more complex customer-driven market of today.
With the growing recognition that the project method is the keystone of modern organizations, most managers in todayās companies spend much of their time focusing on projects. As Tom Peters stated in 1999, āAll white-collar work today is project workā [3]. And as Rolf A. Lundin and his colleagues stated in 2015, āThe projectification of business and working life is ongoing and strong. This movement goes beyond traditional project-organized sectors such as construction, consultancy, media, and entertainment. Project thinking is spreading to most parts of society, including industrial enterprises, governmental organizations, educational institutions, and volunteer groupsā [4].
The Poor Statistics of Project Results
Paradoxically, the sharp increase in the popularity of the project method has been accompanied by an increasing dissatisfaction with current project management results. As succinctly and painfully summarized by the opening statement of a 2007 article in the Harvard Business Review, āProjects fail at a spectacular rateā [5]. This point was emphatically remade in a recent issue of the same journal: āWhy donāt most project managers sound the alarm when theyāre going to blow past their deadlines? Because most of them have no earthly idea when theyāll finish the job. They donāt even think itās possible to knowā [6].
The Standish Group has been doing surveys on all types of IT projects since 1994. Its 2014 report shares this alarming finding:
āThe Standish Group research shows a staggering 31.1% of projects will be cancelled before they ever get completed. Further results indicate 52.7% of projects will cost 189% of their original estimates. The cost of these failures and overruns are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. The lost opportunity costs are not measurable, but could easily be in the trillions of dollars. One just has to look to the City of Denver to realize the extent of this problem. The failure to produce reliable software to handle baggage at the new Denver airport is costing the city $1.1 million per dayā [7].
Such poor results are not limited to IT projects. For example, a Rand Corporation study that examined 52 extremely large projects found that the projects suffered from an average cost growth of 88% [8]. A recent study that examined ten large rail-transit projects in the United States found that the projects suffered from an average cost overrun of 61%, while the average cost overrun of eight large road projects in Sweden was 86% [9]. Finally, a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers that reviewed 10,640 projects from 200 companies in 30 countries across various industries found that only 2.5% of the companies successfully completed 100% of their projects [10].
Developing Project Management Knowledge: Learning from Practice
The overall objective of our research has been to bridge the gap between research and practice by developing practice-based principles for managing projects
Many researchers have concluded that an important reason for the widespread poor results of projects is the wide gap between research and practice [11ā14]. The overall objective of our research has been to bridge this gap by developing practice-based principles for managing projects. Believing that management is best learned by emulating exemplary role models, weāve based this book on more than two decades of research that has attempted to capture the proven practices of some of the most competent project managers. Toward this end, weāve used multiple, complementary approaches to collect firsthand data on the practices of successful project managers, focusing our studies on a selective sample of the best practitioners in leading organizations (Table 1.1). Our research methodologies were influenced in many respects by the well-known management scholar, Henry Mintzberg, who stresses the use of systematic observations of managers [15, 16].
Table 1.1
The various research methods employed in putting together this book
Approach | Rationale |
|---|---|
Interviews and observations | Management is best learned by emulating exemplary project managers |
Dialogues in knowledge-sharing communities | Meaningful reflectionākey for learning about best practicesācan often be facilitated in collaborative story-sharing |
Consulting engagements | Principles learned through the above methods must be put to the test |
Our first approach consisted of field studies and structured research tools, which included two-to-four-hour interviews and up to one-week-long observations of practitioners from various organizations such as AT&T, Bechtel, DuPont, General Motors, IBM, Motorola, PPL Electric Utilities, Procter & Gamble , and Turner Construction Company. Our second approach involved facilitating reflective dialogues among project team members . We collected most of the cases, stories, and practices through our role as the facilitators of the project management knowledge-development and knowledge-sharing communities in three organizations: NASA (five years), Procter & Gamble (three years)...