Project Management

MYOB 2008-06-16
Show #83
Release date: 16 Jun 2008

Notes

Guy Kingston and John Richards take a look at the world of project management.

Is it really as mystical and complex as consultants, software producers and self-appointed experts try to make out? Or, is all one needs is a bit of common sense?

Do entrepreneurs and small business owners need special programmes, structures and implementation plans, or can we do perfectly well with a bog-standard spreadsheet?

This podcast deconstructs what project management is all about and focuses on those elements vital to success.

Project Management

Project management, like many aspects of management theory, owes much to the fact that many of the early theorists served as military or naval officers.

As war became more complicated, missions required ever closer co-operation between different Arms – Infantry, Artillery, Engineers, Signals, Transport, etc – and even between the separate services, Army and Navy.

Of course, there have been projects, especially construction projects, which require close co-operation between different specialists since one man held up the first axle and another put on the first wheel.

It was, however, the particular difficulties of combined operations in combat that led to the development of the more sophisticated techniques of project management.

The first of those difficulties was the pressure of time, which is especially acute on the battlefield. There is simply no opportunity for heads of department to sit down and work out a mutually satisfactory solution to a problem when bullets are flying and men are dying every minute. As much as possible, all contingencies must be foreseen and everything must be planned in advance. The techniques developed to that end are also very useful when competing to tight deadlines.

The second difficulty was the problem of command and control. In most big projects, there is no doubt who is ultimately in charge. If there is serious conflict, it can ultimately be referred to that person.

In a combat situation, that should be the mission commander – the project leader – but the reality of the situation was that the mission commander had little long-term authority over his subordinate officers. Their future careers, pay, and promotions were in the hands not of the mission commander but of the professional hierarchy of the Arm or Service to which they happened to belong.

A mission commander might tell his chief of Artillery “Shell that beach as thoroughly as possible”, but the chief of Artillery, when defining “as thoroughly as possible” in his mind, may be thinking not only of the mission but of the annual audit by the Artillery department, which will hold him accountable for his expenditure of shells. His career in the Artillery department is likely to depend more on the audit than on the approval of the mission commander.

Such a conflict might have to be resolved at a very high level indeed – and while the dispute crawls its way up the hierarchy, the beach remains inadequately shelled.

To avoid such lunacy, military planners worked out solutions that have become the foundation of modern project management. First and foremost, they strengthened the organisational authority of the mission commander, the project manager, relative to the permanent departmental hierarchies.

One of the ironies of modern business is that this is more easily done with sub-contractors than with employees because contract law has more effective sanctions than employment law.

The authority of the mission commander or project manager was also cemented by agreeing as much as possible in advance – especially the objectives of the project, the contingencies, and the order in which things would happen. That should minimise the scope for conflict on the battlefield – or when working to a tight deadline.

Things always find a way to go wrong and the unexpected always happens, but techniques developed in the heat of battle have proved very effective in ensuring things go smoothly more often than not in the commercial sector.