Debating Proper Project Management Discipline

I just had a fun, spirited debate on Twitter about the definition of a project. It started when a friend of mine tweeted this:

Now, my team at Legal Services Corporation recently finished a project (at least, that’s what I call it) to redesign the Find Legal Aid lookup on our website.  I blogged about that effort, which was kickstarted by the DC Legal Hackers, on LSC’s tech blog.  A few things about this:

  • There was no deadline.
  • It was something that we could have outsourced completely, but we wanted to learn the underlying technologies.
  • It was low priority, and my lead developer had a lot of more critical, time-sensitive  projects on his plate.

So we didn’t set a deadline. We pitched the project to management with clear goals (a charter).  After the initial development was done at the DC Legal Hacker’s first hackathon, we identified the four person team that would work on it internally. We reported on it weekly, during our project review.  And we rolled it out when it was finished.

On seeing Norman’s tweet, I challenged the notion that a deadline is a required element of a project. Mind you, many agile programmers work with the bias that iterating until it’s done correctly is more important than meeting a deadline. I doubt that they can actually sell that to their internal or paying clients often, of course.

So I threw my two cents in:

— Peter Campbell (@peterscampbell) April 24, 2014

which brought this reply from someone that I assume is, unlike me, a certified Project Manager, and therefore better versed and disciplined in the best practices:


So, here I am, coming off of a highly successful development and rollout of our little webapp, being told that it wasn’t a valid project.  The entire tweetstream is copied below, but here are the points that I want to make that go a bit beyond Twitter’s 140 requirement.

  • The Project Management Institute (PMI) awards Project Management Professional (PMP) certification to those who complete the requisite hours managing projects and pass the test. I’ve completed their requisite hours, and I’ve taken most of the test prep classes, but I’ve never gotten around to taking the test. So I agree with Rebel that their definition of a project requires a deadline. But I don’t agree with their definition.
  • As with many certifications, what you have to say to pass the test is not always what is going to work in the real world. My first career was working as a cook/sous chef, which I did through most of my very late teens and twenties.  As with technology, I was mostly self-taught. I’ll never forget one day, when working in a French restaurant in Cambridge, Mass., a fresh graduate of the Culinary Institute of America came on board. He didn’t last his first night on the job.  This guy could make some wonderful, complex recipes, but he was overwhelmed when he hit 15 to 20 orders on the wheel. I get the PMI reasoning, but I’ve adapted it over the years in my nonprofit environments where we don’t have the staff or budget to do things to the letter.
  • I absolutely value the governance of a project management discipline.  I firmly believe that you need to recognize targets and milestones if you want to push forward. My tolerance for “no deadline” is in rare cases like the one above. In particular, I need to have work schedules so that large projects don’t end up piling on top of each other.
  • But the trick to successfully getting a lot of things done well in what we call “a constrained resource environment” (e.g. any nonprofit and most of everything else) is to not let the governance get in the way of getting things done. So I take or leave parts of it, being more formal when there’s more at stake and absolutely informal when it doesn’t threaten our outcomes.

I might get that PMP certification someday, although, at this point, it might be when I retire.  But, with a few exceptions, I have a good track record of overseeing some great accomplishments in my career, and I expect that to continue until the day that I can retire.  And I’ll do it by applying appropriate standards and bucking them when they get in the way of the end goal.

Here’s the tweetstream:

 

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