Delivery has been uppermost in my mind recently. My wife is expecting a second child but this one decided he doesn’t want to head in the right direction. Next week he’ll be “from his mother’s womb untimely ripp’d”. Consequently I’ve been thinking heavily both about caesarean delivery and about a number of projects which now share a common delivery date. If I were project managing this birth, I’d just be cajoling the baby to get into position but quite frankly wouldn’t be offering much value. Is this the same for web projects? Do project managers actually help and how can you get more out of them?

According to Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, the population of planet Earth was formed by a spaceship full of middle managers, hairdressers, marketeers and account executives. It’s easy to lump project managers into this mix. When Ford Prefect complains about this group’s inability to get stuff done — “This is futile! 573 committee meetings, and you haven’t even discovered fire yet!” — you can be sure that a project manager was there, maintaining the rolling action item log.

This is often exacerbated by project methodologies that foster a generic culture of project management, where all project management problems are essentially the same and if you can fix the issues around business case, stakeholders, executive sponsorship and resources you’re well on the way to project failure prevention. I’ve no doubt that these rules do apply for all projects, but I wonder that if you have a culture of just focussing on these issues you simply encourage project management by numbers where you get unthinking, standardised responses. As usual, Scot Adams got there first:

Even where you have a good project manger trying to help, it’s usually soft skills. Plant any management consultant in there and there’ll come up with the same answers without really having to get to grips with the fundamental issues. Why is the project struggling? Let’s not call lack of sponsorship a root cause when it’s just a symptom.

Sponsors are reluctant when they don’t understand project goals. You can see this for nearly any social media project. The business case is difficult to prove, the executive don’t buy into social media as reducing costs or increasing revenue, and the rigid formulae of business case definition help no one. This isn’t a sponsorship failure where the project manager can go in and mitigate against lack of funding. It’s fundamentally about whether an organisation is culturally ready to adopt social media and understand how they might use it. The project manager can facilitate this debate, but really you need a subject matter expert rather than a journalist who has read a couple of reports from the big analyst firms.

Jerry Manas recently wrote an article in which he suggests that project managers who run agile projects bring a completely different style to the table that’s much more concrete than traditional approaches. While I don’t agree with the entirety of his article, I think the main hypothesis is right. If you can get project managers who are close to the stakeholders, intimate with the issues and prove that they’re not just some glorified secretary, they can bring real value. Specialist projects require specialist experience and expertise and the world (of IT in particular) is littered with projects that have been delivered to industry best practice, but to abject failure.

The better generic project managers will continue to mitigate against failure and they’ll deliver their projects. But it the end, you’ll be judged on what you’ve delivered, not how you delivered it, and that’s where domain knowledge is essential.

My son will be just as precious to me whether he comes via forceps or scalpel. But it’s the people with the hard skills, not the soft skills, whom I’ll to put my faith in to ensure that he gets delivered safely.

Further reading

A recent presentation I made to the J. Boye community of practice on speeding up project delivery using techniques from Scrum and Prince2.