It is very interesting to observe just how many professions now classify themselves as experienced Project Managers. We would seem to have gone from a time where one would have expected to see some form of Engineering qualification preceding the title of PM against an individual’s name. Nowadays we find that Accounting Firms have PMs, as do Banks, Insurance Companies, Telecommunications, Pharmaceuticals, Software Developers, Retail Stores, the list is endless. This is only right!
Everything in business can be broken down to a project, no matter the industry, the profession or department we are all dealing with projects no matter how small or large. It is therefore no wonder that the PM fraternity has grown exponentially over the years as more and more organisations come to this realisation.
Once they accept they are dealing with projects, those companies that have numerous projects then begin to develop Programme Management Offices (PMO) and Programme Support Offices (PSO) within their organisations. Some even go beyond this and start to segregate their projects into Portfolios. So far, so good.
 Soon everyone becomes a Programme Manager “expert” and their internal leadership skills begin to emanate from their very being, strategising and co-ordinating everyone and anything they can “manage” within their line of sight (and even some go beyond and manage those in their peripheral vision).
If you observe closely you will notice that one very important cog in the machinery that is PM is very often overlooked and deemed to be insignificant to the overall success of the business at hand and that is the actual Programme (or for my US viewers the Schedule). It is almost seen as a document that is not critical to the realisation of the vision they have. The amount of times I have met with companies that have informed me that they do not require detail Programmes to be drawn up as they know from their vast years of experience and the instinctive gift bestowed upon them at birth to be in a position of near Zen when reviewing the requirements of their project that they know where the Critical Path is, no argument or discussion, instinctively, they just know!!
One overseas client I recall told me they only deal with Resource Capacity Planning and do not require a programme to be drafted up. When I pushed the issue and asked what their Resources were assigned to, they disclosed Tasks - what else? I then asked them to explain which Tasks were critical and which Tasks were able to slip to allow the Resources to operate at optimum level, silence ensued, and they eventually got the message. If you don’t have a Programme of Works to assign your Resources to and fully logic link it with a Critical Path, how can you ever manage to deliver the project within budget and on time?
Then there was the qualified Arbitrator who, when attending my Primavera Course disclosed that he had never any need to turn on the backward pass in the software system he had been using to date as he once again instinctively knew the outcome and where the Critical Path would lie. After much debate and frustration on my behalf we eventually ended the session with him admitting that you could never review or adjudicate over a Programme without having the Backward Pass activated in the system.
All of this leads one to believe that there are many PM courses out there that may span days, weeks, months or even years but are they forgetting to teach the students about the most important topic of all, Planning and Scheduling. Have we come to a stage where being a PM is more about psychology, people skills, leadership and praying that things get done on time?
Planning and Scheduling is the axis that PM rotates on, disregard it and denigrate it at your peril. I first entered the PM World in 1980 when I joined a civil engineering construction company. Because I happened to be in the drawing office and deemed to have good penmanship we were given the Programmes to “draw-up”. The number of activities back then in our Programmes was dictated by the number of spaces provided on the sheet whether it was an A3, A2, A1 or God forbid an A0 Sheet. Our critical path was calculated through predecessor and successor tables and then coloured up manually by hand. Times have changed, Programmes now have hundreds, if not thousands of activities in them and to not give them time, respect or investment is to put your project at risk.
Amazingly, most companies nowadays would not manage their finances via a spreadsheet - they would insist on purchasing a good, top of the range, accounting package. Why? Usually because the CFO in the company wants the best and so they should. That same company probably has to make do with at worst a spreadsheet system for their Programmes or perhaps a light weight Programming tool whose best selling point is colour coding individual task bars!
If your company’s very existence is dependent on the success of bringing its projects in on time and on budget, and managing with what scarce resources you have, then you need to stand up and be heard. No more planning via spreadsheets, no more requests to be taken on how one task should be crossed hatched and coloured green while another one is striped and coloured turquoise. PM is about planning and managing those programmes to a successful conclusion.