Managing the Schedule versus Managing the Project

Project managers must operate in an increasingly complex environment. Socio-politically, technologically, and organisationally, the world is now vastly different from that when the project management profession was ‘born’ over 50 years ago. Yet, as a practice, project managers remain wedded to the concepts that were formulated during those early years and still attempt to apply them, regardless of the drastically altered context. We seem unable to let go of the vision we have of ourselves as technologists, armed with a body of knowledge like our cousins in other professions such as engineers, lawyers, accountants, and doctors. They represent the pinnacle of the Enlightenment project to elevate reason to a position of primacy in our society. We align ourselves with that vision because it is, unarguably, a good one. It is also the wrong one for our specific practice. It is a vision that has trapped us in a paradigm of pseudo-science, one hopelessly ill-equipped to deal with the problems it is meant to solve, and in doing so has twisted concepts of success and failure to the point where success is no longer even possible on the terms we have established for ourselves.