Donna Fitzgerald12 years ago in July I was at Project World DC presenting a paper on the “Internet: Great Tool or Terrible Trap”. The point of the presentation was to encourage all PMs to actually invest the time and effort to build a web site for their project and to use it as a way to communicate to their stakeholders. If this seems like a strange topic for ’97 then you are forgetting one of the great truths of PPM which is all PMs are luddites professionally. Technology is a source of risk and we get paid to take the risk out.
A year ago April at Spring symposium I gave a presentation on using Enterprise 2.0 on projects with essentially the same message I’d had at the DC conference 10 years before. There’s a point in time when late adoption is not only silly it’s counterproductive. This was driven home to me even more forcibly when I read a column in the New York Times about the fact that the government has now decided that wikis and blogs and facebook accounts are something important as a way to reach their constituency.
What I’d like to do here is start a discussion as to why we aren’t doing more. I understand the “it’s not my job perspective” but I also know that as a group of people we can move mountains when we have. So what is it about this topic that is falling on deaf ears? Or maybe I should rephrase that — the topic of collaboration and the role that collaborative can play in a collaborative process just isn’t striking our folks with any degree of resonance. Some of it is survival I’m sure. After all I’m not going to refuse to do a program just because the Powers That Be won’t give me access to a collaborative tool. On the other hand I’m certainly going to use the one that the company has installed (if it exists). And this is where I see the issue. Many PMs work in companies that have tools in place today that can do a lot more than they’re using them for and yet I haven’t found anyone who is pushing the envelope
This shouldn’t read like a rant. I’m very sensitive to the challenges PMs actually face in their day to day lives on the job BUT I’m increasingly focused on the fact that we’re not taking charge of our own environments and that our choice to ignore enterprise 2.0 capabilities on our programs is a leading example
If anyone is reading this I hope we can get some discussion going. I think this issue is the tip of a much larger iceberg that has to do with leadership and our own self image as PMs.
Category: Technology Tags: Collaborative tools, technology adoption
4 responses so far ↓
1 Will Horton April 7, 2009 at 1:10 pm
I would say that your observation is correct due to two factors in project management that have been taking root progressively for more than a decade.
First there has been the movement toward project management as a separate discipline divorced from the technologies used in the project. This translates into project managers who know the processes and techniques of project management but have no grasp, and often no interest, in the technology used. The view is that if someone is a project manager, they can manage building a bridge or building an IS application. It is the project management that counts.
The second factor is increasing refusal to take risks. It is linked to the first item in so far as applying a new technology in a project requires leadership and vision to inspire the team into appropriating the technology. If the project manager has no understanding of the technology, then there can be no vision of how it brings value or inspiration of others in the need to learn it. If you do not understand the details of what is being done then any innovation or new technique is feared because it represents a move into tera incognito where risks can not be evaluated. If difficulties are encountered, the project manager lacks the understanding of how to recover. If the project does not succeed, you are at risk.
Unless project management returns to its roots of also requiring a degree of understanding of the technologies involved, this situation is unlikely to change. It is still improbable to find a bridge construction project manager lacking a background in civil engineering. Yet it is believed that anyone knowing project management can lead an IS/IT project.
As new generations, who grew up using colaboration tools, move into project management, these tools will become much more actively used and applied in the project solution. But it will not lead to project teams adopting technology that is new to them, just a generational shift in the technologies that are already well understood.
2 Donna Fitzgerald April 10, 2009 at 8:21 pm
Thanks for your comment. Not much I can add since I couldn’t agree more. I think there’s some confusion around the issue of what your and I might both think of as the “generic PM” movement. I agree that in concept if someone is a good PM in one discipline he or she has the capability of being a good PM in another discipline BUT what they don’t have is the judgement or the experience. I’ve been discussing this with members of the PM community for 12 years now and I’ve finally realized that this is an issue where there doesn’t appear to be a happy medium. People are either on one side of the fence or they’re on the other. Me.. I’m in the camp where I think PMs should know at least something about the project they’re managing for all sorts of reasons I will be discussing in the future
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