You know the feeling when you have eaten too much - usually because the fare on offer looks too good to pass up.  You know how a few hours later you feel - blah!  You know how you say to yourself - "why did I need to eat all that food at that siting - it was going nowhere, I could have eaten it later - stupid me!"  (My daughter cooked the most amazing short bread last night - so I feel a bit like this right now, as I start into my Saturday!).

                                                                                                                Anyway - back to project management!  The meal of project management has many courses - project goals, task management, issue management, risk management, deliverables, customer requirements, conflict management, cost management, change management, and so on and so on - you know the list!  On a day to day basis most mere mortals use a very small amount of project management and definitely use it very informally.  There is always a cadre of trained and interested project management professionals who have trained themselves to have a great appetite - and more importantly they actually need lots of project management to run any project they are involved in - it is how they naturally operate and how they need to operate.  It is a bit like the 12,000 calories a day that Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps needs compared to the 2,000+ calories a day limit that most adults work to. 

So what happens? - well the trained project management professionals who operate on a higher project management level (on their 12,000 calories!)  start force feeding us mere mortals - and we get indigestion and get very sick very quickly - so we leave the table of disciplined project management - sometimes never to come back!  This is a real pity.

Clearly different projects require different amounts of project management.  But that is not the topic I am addressing here.  Assuming you can't change the people you have on the project there is no point in giving them a 12,000 calorie a day project management approach, if they can only realistically digest 2,000 calories a day.  You may need 12,000 calories a day to run your projects but they can not hack it!          

So what is the solution?  It is easy - the best solutions always are!  Start where your teams are in reality in project management terms.  Design a consistent 2,000 calorie a day project management process to get the teams started.  Do NOT attempt to start with a 6,000 calorie one, just because it looks so attractive and you love it yourself and you figure it will be good for them!  But you can of course design graduations of project management between 500 calories a day and 12,000 calories.  "Why go all the way back to 500 calories day?", you might well ask.  Some people have been so under-nourished in project management terms that you need to start where they are in reality and bring them on gently.  You can iterate more quickly through the levels if you build it up small and quickly rather than over-feed on the first go. 

The following diagram has a sample of the 500 calorie a day mere mortal all the way up to the 12,000 calorie a day Olympic champion project management spectrum.  What attracts a lot of groups to work with us is this realistic approach - but what never ceases to amaze me is that even our customers fall into the trap and start biting off too much to begin with. STOP please!