Rethinking Project Management

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Rethinking Project Management

• Miles Shepherd
• Visiting Fellow
• Bournemouth Business School

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Background to Network

• National need for programme and project
  management skills,
• Growth and increasing complexity in project work,
• Growing importance of projects in organisations
  government,
• Increasing membership of associations,
• Perceptions of the failure of projects,
• Dissatisfaction with the discipline and
  profession.

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Focus Areas

• Shaping Planning the Network
• Making sense of the field (context)
• Making sense of PM practice
• PM in different sectors
• Rethinking the foundations
• New research directions
• Messages for Industry

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Meetings

• UMIST Content, context and process
• UCL Emerging themes and new perspectives
• Newcastle Projects Across Different Sectors
• London Projectification Managing Multiple
  Projects
• Strathclyde Actuality Uncertainty
• Bath The Profession and Practitioner
  Development
• Manchester Research Topics, Industry Messages
  Network Review

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Practitioner Development Concerns

• The recognition of the multiplicity of project
  management roles and competencies.
• Project management requires a wider range of
  knowledge than conceived in the past - How can it
  be brought to bear in practice?
• Thinking about uncertainty needs to be more
  sophisticated.
• There are some contexts for which the APM Body of
  Knowledge (BoK) is wrong.

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Concerning Practitioner Development

• How practitioners learn and develop.
• Reclaiming the knowledge professional
  associations vs academic institutions.

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Reclaiming the knowledge

• There is excessive focus on what to do - methods
  and tools (Prince2) - and an unhelpful separation
  of training and practice. More attention is
  required to address front end definition, soft
  skills, understanding of types of knowledge,
  social processes (CoP), learning in context,
  development of judgement, the need for educated
  senior managers. Soft skills to address
  reading, perception, self-awareness, judgement,
  engaging with complexity and uncertainty,
  intuition. Consideration should be given to
  simulation, coaching, double-loop learning,
  combined individual and group learning, and
  combining individual development with and
  organisational development.

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Practitioner Development

• The process of professionalisation
• Knowledge issues
• Implications for academia

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Professionalisation Issues

• the excessive focus on what to do - methods and
  tools rather than craft knowledge
• the dislocation between training, development and
  practice
• the excessive focus on knowledge acquisition at
  the expense of capability development.

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The process of professionalisation

• The role of the professional associations.
• The relationship between BoKs, practitioners and
  certification.
• Scope breadth of project management knowledge.
• Contexts whether there are any contexts where
  BoKs are inappropriate.

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BoK Issues

• understanding what the BoK is for, and the
  clarity of the definition of the profession,
• the ethical stance to be taken whether
  client-orientated or contractual,
• the underlying theory of project management,
• the research design being based on opinions
  rather than investigation.

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Network view on BoK as Standard

• It is reasonable that governments should demand
  or impose standards, since they suffer from gross
  wastage on projects. However it is not logical
  that they should limit this regulation to project
  execution.
• We should query whether the trend and process
  whereby BoKs become established and hard to
  change is inevitable.
• That the APM may need to rethink its policy of
  coupling BoK and professional certification.
  Other profession (eg GMC) leave knowledge
  ownership to the universities.
• It is essential that academia fulfils its role to
  describe things as they see them to go beyond
  the formal BoK and similar. There is a need for
  independent research based knowledge.
• Practitioners will welcome the rethinking of
  boundaries and expansion of the curricula, but
  will resist changes to the certification levels.

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Areas for Consideration

• The need to consider how the BoK is used in
  practice, and how practitioners relate to it, use
  it, ignore it, work round it etc
• The value and limitations of codified knowledge,
  and whether it is beneficial or detrimental to
  practitioner development.
• Whether BoKs are adequate for guiding
  practitioners.

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Areas for Consideration - 2

• The distinction between a BoK and a guide to the
  BoK (PMI).
• The distinction between a formal BoK and a wider
  less defined bok.
• The distinction between a BoK (defining) and
  models (for use).
• The wider body of management knowledge that is
  relevant.

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Areas for Consideration - 3

• That in other disciplines there are restrictions
  on practice by those who cannot prove their
  knowledge.
• The need or otherwise for project management to
  have a code of ethics.
• Auditable following of procedures vs the
  application of professional judgement.

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Areas for Consideration - 4

• Whether project management professionals are
  equivalent to others professionals whose
  decisions and actions can be trusted in complex
  situations.
• The means by which professional groups use BoK to
  close off alternative approaches.
• The value, or otherwise, of certification of
  professional groups by nation states.
• The importance of developing the capabilities of
  project clients client development.

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Reclaiming Knowledge

• In traditional professions, knowledge is claimed
  by academic institutions while practice remains
  in the domain of the practitioner. In PM, both
  are claimed by the associations.
• This stultifies innovation and leads to conflicts
  of interest equivalent to protection by a
  guild. A preferable cycle is for academics to
  carry out research, and then codify knowledge
  which is dispersed in the public domain..

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Reclaiming Knowledge Current Issues

• Intellectual ownership (cross-disciplinary)
• Resourcing and funding,
• Handling pluralism,
• The function of project management,
• The nature of knowledge and the role of government

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Further information

• Papers from all meetings are available from
• www.rethinkingpm.org.uk

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New Directions

• Here the word
• Towards
• means
• to enhance the from position
• rather than to discard it