I just had to write a chapter on Project Management for a business studies textbook.
I used to hate teaching business English and writing business English materials, but then I went freelance and started running my own business and suddenly the subject came alive for me. Working with Americans and Chinese people also invigorated my interest in the subject: they don't tend to look askance at the business of making money in the way that many Brits do. In recent years my interest in business has verged on the geeky. I've become the kind of person who enjoys taking training courses at the Inland Revenue (sorry, HMRC) and researching the minutiae of contract law. My accountant says I am his star client, because my spreadsheets are so efficient he can do my tax return in half the time it normally takes (and yes, he does charge me half as much). I knew his business was going to go bust three months before my last boss did.
This last part made the writing of this chapter a rather bittersweet process. One of the tasks I set was to read quotes from dissatisfied clients and identify the mistake made by the project manager, another was to identify the most vulnerable points along a project's lifecycle, another how to incorporate risk management. A couple of years ago this would mostly have just been common sense, but I've seen so many projects botched through bad project management in recent times that I have a rather uncomfortably large store of real life experiences to draw from.
Thinking hard, I can't call to mind a single really good project manager, and I'm starting to wonder if it's even possible to find one. The skills required are so varied that anyone at the helm of a complex project is bound to fail on at least some grounds. If you're good at managing people, chances are you dislike detail. Perhaps you're hardcore at keeping suppliers within a budget but useless at communicating with your team. Almost invariably you'll have an overinflated sense of your abilities in one area and deep insecurities about your abilities in others.
Most of this comes down to personality and ego, in the end. I've seen an entire series of books literally ruined because the project manager was out of her depth and desperately trying to salvage her reputation by ruining those of everyone in her team. Judging by the stories I hear at publishing network events, this type of thing is depressingly common.
So it's nice that I have so much material on which to base my chapter, but I heartily wish that more of it were positive. Why don't they teach management in schools?
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This reminds me of my amusement when I spoke to an acquaintance who was working for a software company that `rescued' software projects for businesses. She said their `secret' was that they actually used and applied the theoretical software engineering principles (including project management that you would recognise) that were in the textbooks when you did the computing courses (we'd been on the same course at one point, way back when). What it meant was that they insisted on a properly-specified design specification and delivery schedule and planned things to arrive on time, so instead of nothing being delivered except fanciful promises something that did something useful arrived on schedule and budget.
What made me laugh was realising why it works... it seems obvious to me: fundamentally it works because it is an imposed from the outside autonomous measure that disconnects the existing company management hierarchy, who would otherwise `manage' the project into oblivion on an on-going basis instead of specifying a concrete goal and aiming intelligently at that. (I was, of course, also laughing at myself - remembering how foaming at mouth enraged I used to get at meetings in the dotbomb company I worked for trying to tell them they didn't get why everything stayed broken and this latest `fix' wouldn't fix anything any more than the last one we'd never carried through. The boss seemed to like it though - he shouted at me a lot too.)
As Scott Adams says when in his alter ego: "All people are idiots. And they are also weasels."
Well - they SHOULD teach management skills in school, because everyone's got to manage something at some point in their lives.
I managed people and services for 22 years; now I'm managing projects. I've been working on an online course in project management (as well as a book -- perhaps someday we should talk about collaboration, if you are interested) and I think you're right, that you have to be both a forest and a trees person to do this well. It's challenging; but it's the kind of challenge I find really, really satisfying. (I still miss managing computer geeks though. Project-managing them isn't the same.)
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