Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools (in Projects)

Projects have been around forever. Since the beginning of history, people have organized themselves to turn ideas into reality. Challenging ideas as building a great pyramid, a great canal to connect oceans, a great wall, the first atomic bomb, a telescope to take pictures of big bang, a vaccine to save the world, etc. All these ideas came true thanks to projects.

Project management is a relatively young discipline. Over 50 years ago, experts agreed that operations management was not good at managing projects. New processes were needed to finish projects on time, on cost, delivering the value and meeting the business goals, and then to get the final product, service or result transitioned to day-to-day operations.

Regardless of the industry, all projects are expected to be initiated, planned, executed, controlled, and closed. World class expert professionals shared best practices to manage requirements, scope, time, cost, quality, resources, communications, risks, procurement, stakeholders, etc. Standardized process frameworks were released to manage projects. A discipline named project management began to differentiate and specialize.

Nowadays, ideas are more challenging and consequently, projects to turn them into reality are more and more complex. There are projects to make computers think better than us, to make computers extraordinarily fast, to drive without a driver, to fight climate emergency, to make fusion energy viable, to colonize Mars, etc. In these projects, hundreds of people are working simultaneously, in a coordinated manner, from distant places. Closer to us, in the companies we work for, projects are everywhere. Knowledge workers usually have several project meetings every day.

Today’s projects demand excellent management. Companies have to get projectified to beat the competition, expand into new markets, innovate, grow, etc. Poor project management can hurt companies (Bard case). Excellent project management can boost the stock market value (Microsoft).

Most of today’s projects require:

• Rolling Wave Planning: Since requirements are not clear enough, the project scope has to be progressively elaborated, continuously interacting with stakeholders.
• Beyond the Triple Constraint: Controlling changes, time and cost is less important than value delivery and meeting the business goals.
• Real time Governance: Managers need to make informed real time decisions, anticipating issues while there are still options to correct project performance, and they don’t have time to read comprehensive documentation from dozens or hundreds of projects. PMOs are to be value driven.
• Inclusive Project Management: Just one person to manage the whole project is not effective: collaboration is needed because the best solutions may come from one of many stakeholders. Nonprofessionals are to get involved in project management.

Now we can say that project management has changed from documents to outcomes, from processes to people. Clear evidence can be found in the newest edition of PMBOK, which is no longer based on processes but on principles and performance domains.

Professional project management is no longer effective if projects are managed in isolation—project team makes all—or managed by meetings or reporting. Stakeholders’ continuous collaboration is needed to achieve the project management goals, that is: delivering value on time, under budget, with the right quality, etc. In this digital hyper connected world, continuous collaboration in projects means online people collaboration to take informed decisions and propose actions proactively. Projects need this kind of distributed collaboration, especially.

Any tool aimed to unify professional project management for all projects should adapt features to different roles, so that people can only access the right information when needed. This has been the biggest challenge we have faced at PMPeople, being these kinds of functional requirements the source for most changes since we started development in 2015.

Professional project management roles can be separated in 2 sides:

• Demand Management: People who propose projects and monitor performance.
• Supply Management: People who use human and material resources to execute projects.

As explained in this article, professional project management roles can be defined as follows:

• Stakeholder (SH): People who may affect, be affected by, or perceive themselves to be affected by decisions, activities, or outcomes of projects.
• Requester (RQ): People who ask for new projects. They work hard to get projects approved, follow progress, and have great interest in completion.
• Sponsor (SP): People who provide resources and support for the project and are accountable for enabling success.
• Functional Manager (FM): People with management authority over a Business Unit (BU). Any project should belong to one BU. Even when a project shares resources from different BUs, good practice is that one of them is identified as accountable.
• Project Management Office (PMO): People who standardize the project-related governance processes and facilitates the sharing of resources, methodologies, tools, and techniques.
• PM Assistant (PMA): People who provide a consultative role and assist project managers in their day to day activity.
• Portfolio Manager (PfM): People assigned by the performing organization to establish, balance, monitor, and control portfolio components in order to achieve strategic business objectives.
• Program Manager (PgM): People authorized by the performing organization to lead the team or teams responsible for achieving program objectives.
• Team Members (TM): People who support the project manager in performing the work of the project to achieve its objectives.
• Resource Manager (RM): People who manage resource pools, being responsible for recruiting, professional career planning, training, incentive policies, managing leaves, absences, etc.
• Project Manager (PM): People assigned by the performing organization to lead the team that is responsible for achieving the project objectives.

Let’s describe now how these different roles can collaborate in a projectized organization. In PMPeople we use the following table to summarize the main objects, and who can create, update or delete them:

For instance, the object project can be Created/Updated/Deleted (CUD) by a Functional Manager. However, a Portfolio Manager cannot create or delete, only update project information (Update = U). Project Managers can create and update but not delete (Create/Update = CU).

Let’s describe some representative use cases in our tool PMPeople.