Project management legend

Every morning you woke up and google for project management you will find new books, blogs, podcast talking about new thinking or methodology. I have spent 45 minutes in the morning on a train to a place where I burn myself to full extent everyday. I am loving it. Not because any project management legend reveal itself in my daily work, on the contrary, none of them has.

Here is a suggestion, go to your bookshelf and your harddrive, pull out all the content which are project management related, put them in those big PC box you took for free from office. The idea is, let's see what would happen if you don't refer to them for 3 months.

I never believe, you can adopt a project management methodology and make it work. It doesn't work like that, the sequence is wrong. You deal with mess for a while; because you are a hitchhiker in nature so you are lucky that you have not got bogged down by the negative experience; you decide that changes might sound like a good idea; you think hard about which are the areas should be improved, most of the times, those are the areas are most sensitive in an organisation; you work out what is wrong, and what is the result should be if thing doesn't go wrong; you maybe don't know about the fancy buzz words used in various ridiculously expensive management training course, but again, you are lucky enough to know some common senses - what stops things working is bad, what makes things tick is good; you then put those small pieces which made things tick from your past lives and those you stole from greater minds; now you have weapons to deal with the devil which dragged you down; you exercise them, some are still tasty, some gone out of date already, anyway, you end up with bunch of practice which proved to tick the boxes in where you are... This is for real, real management life.

So, why we choose to escape from the problems and wish that someone else who is NOT in your position has already figured this all out FOR you? There is NO free lunch. No one has come along from exactly the same path. If you are a project manager in an organisation, you should consider yourself unique, although wiser did say that you can't believe how much effort people has thrown just try to be normal. The problem is unique, the opportunity is unique. No one has resolved this before, there is no place to hide for you.

A good project manager don't believe in legend or myth. He has faith in humanity. We know what went wrong, as long as you keep a fresh eye in the morning; we also know how to deal with them, as long as we have enough courage not to search for legends.

Now, it doesn't mean that we could not summarise typical situations a project manager could end up with.

A. Endless project

B. Fragmental project team

C. No focus, no confidence, no commitment, if there are identifiable stakeholders

D. Faultlessly wrong design

E. Time/Money/Quality pick-two game

F. Now really, we don't know what we are building, we aren't even know who is going to buy the stuff

G. For the name of heaven, there is no safe island, all you have is risk, how could you manage

H. On top of all, let's play politics

A good project manager has fairy good idea of what kinda troubles he has got himself into within very short time. Sadly, many of us make assumptions way too easily that we could rely on our shiny experience to kill the bugs. Unfortunately, history proves us wrong, all the time actually. Experience tells us what problems we might need to confront, but it doesn't offer us a silver bullet. Simply becase the solution of the problem is so unique to the subtly different environment you are in. Let's just say, give up on the reference thing, be creative, no one is gonna blame you that you didn't quote the Greece as long as you get people out of trouble.