Following on from my post yesterday regarding Want a Better Plan Get A Better Process, I started thinking about an event that happened in the dim and distant past. I was engaged by a multinational to audit one of their key business development projects and to look at the team capabilities and methodology being applied. Although I was engaged in many interviews during this project I very clearly remember my discussion with one of the project managers. I remember him stating:
We’ve finished doing all that Prince2 stuff and now we can get on with the project
My first reaction was probably the same as yours. Here we have a project manager who clearly does not understand Prince2. For those of you who don’t know Prince2 is a project management methodology. But once you’ve picked your jaw of the floor, you need to assess what created this behaviour and work the problem.
As I stated yesterday, the problem isn’t the project manager, it’s you or more correctly his organisation. He had taken the training and was advised of the importance of applying the process and yet he saw the process as getting in the way of the deliverable as opposed to enabling it. He had energy and commitment but was not convinced of the efficacy of the process he was advised to use. The result was that he produced the relevant paperwork and carried on running his own delivery process off radar.
From the organisation’s point of view it would have been better saving its money on project management training as it was about to gain no real benefit. Worse still it would seem to the executive that they were running a Prince2 project when clearly they were not. It is not enough to put a process or methodology in place, you need to make sure that people are bought in and see how it can help them to deliver. Otherwise, the results will be … that tick box culture.
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