Making Projects Sing

Raji Sivaraman, Chris Wilson

• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781631574597
• eBook ISBN: 9781631574603
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Project Management
• Index: Business

This book explores project management (PM) from a musical perspective. Music is a significant example of a nontraditional arena where PM is vital, yet it is only beginning to be seen as a vital tool. Therefore, this book will give an in depth and preeminent look at the PM processes and knowledge areas that are of utmost importance in many fields that PM is not used for currently. Seeking to understand projects in musical ways, synergies between music and the wider project management profession are many and varied. Written and developed by international experts in the project management and music professions, this book represents a unique and insightful approach to the study of the subject. The authors take a fresh look at practical models of musical thinking capable of application at every scale of project management, and in every possible project management environment. If you want to make your projects more musical, or simply have an interest exploring project management in music, this is the book for you!

CHAPTER 1

What Has Music Got to Do With Project Management?

Music is concerned with harmony and rhythm, so that you may speak of a melody or figure having good rhythm or good harmony—the term is correct enough; but to speak metaphorically of a melody or figure having a “good colour,” as the masters of choruses do, is not allowable, although you can speak of the melodies or figures of the brave and the coward, praising the one and censuring the other.

—Plato, in Jowett (1892)

Music is a unique form of human behavior. Common to all human cultures and apparently evident throughout all human history, the project of music, as with all aspects of human cultural activity, reflects increasing complexity and diversity over time, and provides a distinctive context through which to consider the development of codes and conventions, techniques and technologies, processes and practices. If we think of musical activity as project activity and in terms of project management (PM), numerous processes become apparent as distinctly project like. From individual technique in composition and performance, through to the complexity of teams and musical leadership, the very conventions of musical experience also reflect sophisticated cultural projects in and of themselves. Decoding particular queues in the music, we even feel the instinctive or often compulsive need to move in the presence of musical experience and to become an integral part of the musical activity itself.

The Project Management Institute (PMI) defines a project as a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result, and project managers as change agents using skills and expertise to develop shared purpose in project teams. Evident at various scales of activity throughout human history, PM has been codified as a discipline since first emerging in the United States Armed Forces in the 1950s. Formalized through the foundation of professional bodies and organizations since the 1960s (International Project Management Association 1965, IPMA; The Project Management Institute 1969, PMI), and operating with widely recognized professional accreditation frameworks for PM professionals for nearly 50 years, PM is both an overarching term to describe areas of collective activity and a professionalism and discipline. Successful PM not only involves good leadership, but also represents a range of other professional attributes and abilities.

From Adamiecki’s Harmonogram (1896, in Marsh 1975) to Henry Gantt’s Gantt chart (1912, in Wilson 2003) as the scale and sophistication of projects in civil engineering, military, manufacturing, and the emerging high-tech sector, increased PM techniques such as DuPont and Rand’s critical path method (1957, in Armstrong-Wright 1969), program evaluation review technique (PERT 1958, in Roman 1962), work breakdown structure (1962, in Cleland and Lavold 2008), Royce’s waterfall method (1970, in Larman and Basili 2003), Scrum project management (1986, in Pries and Quigley 2011), PRINCE2 (1996, in Bentley 2010), and more recently, agile project management (Cobb 2011), have become more common features of professional activity far beyond the industrial contexts from which they first emerged. PM is nevertheless a quintessentially industrial and corporate process, and far divorced from musical practice both as a competency and as a field of terminology.

Differently Similar

It is reasonable to consider PM of a major civil engineering project as very different from the composition of a song or learning to play the piano. Indeed, there is, as observed by Weaver (2007), a very clear distinction between generalized approaches to PM, and the professional discipline of PM. As well as the obvious difference of scale of activity and the number of agents involved, there is also the significant cultural difference between an industrial and pragmatic context of PM as a field of professional activity, and the individualized, romanticized, and “free” context associated with creative musical activities. Adopting a purposefully contrarian perspective, in PM terms, differences between the industrial and the musical, the corporate and the artistic, are readily identifiable. As characterized in Table 1.1, stereotypical social perceptions of differences between creative arts practice and PM lie in many areas.

Table 1.1 Polarizing perspectives: Considering the differences between PM and artistic practice

Project management	Creative practice
Clear destination	Uncertain destination
Clear route (and fallbacks)	Unplanned/vague route
Certainty of aims/outcomes	Uncertain aims/outcomes
Reducing uncertainty	Extending uncertainty
Working with certainty	Working with naivety
Removing uncertainty	Adding uncertainties
Resolving problems	Generating problems
Measured progress	Uncertain progress
Focus on competence	Exploring incompetence
Crisis-/opportunity-led deviation	Deliberate deviation
Efficiency	Inefficiency
Destination	Journey
Reducing/tackling risk	Increasing/embracing risk
Risk as danger	Risk as opportunity
Profit	Loss
Terminal	Germinal
Obstacle	Purpose
Soft	Hard
Rigidity	Flexibility
Stable	Unstable
Organized	Organic
Predictable	Unpredictable
Busy	Difficult
Exhilarating	Exhausting
Tried-and-tested (proven)	Novelty (unproven)
Familiar (known)	Unfamiliar (unknown)
Order	Disruption
Focus	Blur
Control	Participation
Early project completion	Abandonment
End	Arrival
Completion	Conclusion

Source: Adapted from Wilson and Brown (2014).

Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.

—W.H. Auden, in Archer (2010)

Purpose, Process, and Product; Reason, the Method, and the Outcome

Surface differences between PM and creative practice can be broadly characterized as lying in the areas of purpose, process, and product; the reason, the method, and the outcome. The purpose of many acts of what subsequently became recognized as significant creativity in the arts is often simply that of personal fulfillment or recreation, at least initially. For most musicians, the deeply established connection between discipline and self dictates that the delineation between personal and professional remains permanently blurred and ill defined. Core elements of PM practice such as planning, scheduling, target setting, objective setting, and progress monitoring, can also be subject to considerable variation in approach and limited clarity or definition, and more idiosyncratic interpretation.

I practice and work hard at my music, but I’m not saving lives here.

—Harry Connick Jr.

Perhaps the most significant variation between PM and creative arts practice relates to the stage at which outcomes are defined and to the scope and tolerance for uncertainty of outcomes. In artistic terms, outcomes can be characterized in part as merely the proverbial target drawn around the final resting place of the arrow; any focus on artistic expression bringing the inevitability of subjectivity in any final evaluation. Equally, the implications of failed artistic endeavor are most commonly associated with low and at least highly localized risk. While considerable investment may be made by record companies in supporting the development of creative projects with some uncertainty as to their final form, there is greater flexibility in the application of melody, harmony, and rhythm, and consequently less risk in terms of uncertainty of outcomes should new approaches prove ineffective, than might be typically associated with structural engineering or IT infrastructure systems where an equivalent failure would prove unconscionable.

Without the element of uncertainty, the bringing off of even, the greatest business triumph would be dull, routine, and eminently unsatisfying.

—J.P. Getty

Equally, related to the more focused value evident with uncertainty in musical creativity, creative processes typically associated with musicians can vary enormously, and routinely reflect profoundly un-project-management-like behaviors. While there are numerous examples of industrialized musical creation, such as jingle writing, media composition, and sound and music design for computer games, in which quite structured routines and deadlines are more common, the cultural perspective of authenticity in musical creation more typically focuses on the activities of gifted individuals and often-chaotic creative circumstances. Music commonly emerges through haphazard and unstructured processes of inspiration and happenstance, and much of the music recognized as among the most significant is the product of highly un-PM-like activities.

As with literature and the arts, most renowned composers, song-writers, and creative musicians are innovators who pioneer new creative processes working in often highly individualized and idiosyncratic ways. Indeed, for many artists, the creative process itse...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Foreword by Jim Snyder
• Foreword by Reinhard Wagner
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. What Has Music Got to Do With Project Management?
• Chapter 2. Locating Project Management Insights in Music
• Chapter 3. Project Management Insights in Musical Creativity
• Chapter 4. Applying a Musical Perspective to Project Management
• Chapter 5. A Project Management Perspective for Music
• Chapter 6. A Resolution of Sorts
• About the Authors
• Bibliography and Discography
• Index
• Adpage
• Backcover