April 17, 2023
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:
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:
As explained in this article, professional project management roles can be defined as follows:
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.