Who would you say is the most successful dictator of all time?? Mussolini? Napoleon? Ferdinand Marcos?? Ha - It’s a trick question! In my book, there’s no such thing… They all end bad even after a good run of pushing people around and making up for inferiority complexes.
I think the same is true in the world of project management. I just spent some good money on the latest edition of the Project Management Body of Knowledge, aka the PMBOK -- which is actually pronounced PIM-BOCK by those of you obsessed with project management by the rules. This is what I found. And I am not even making this up!
Here’s what on page 6 out of 458 glorious pages of “knowledge.” The five steps, per the Project Management Institute, for managing a project. They are:
- Initiating
- Planning
- Executing
- Monitoring and Controlling
- Closing
I think step 4 says it all. “Monitoring and Controlling.” I would roughly translate this to “intense scrutiny of other people’s work and pushing people around in an effort to get your way and take credit for the outcome in the unlikely event the project gets done on time and within budget.” OK, maybe that’s a bit of a stretch, but you get the point.
And here’s what it says on page 409, almost as an afterthought. No kidding. Some other skills that might be worth having:
- Leadership
- Team Building
- Motivation
- Communication
- Influencing
- Decision Making
- Political and Cultural Awareness
- Negotiation
I may be in the minority here, but my experience is that the second list is just slightly more important than the first in actually helping to manage a project to success.
And here’s the good news. For a long time, even if we believed that project management was best exercised by a collaborative style that emphasized teamwork over dictates, there were few tools out there to help. Not anymore! I have found pmPoint to be an excellent project management add-on to the world of collaboration that comes from SharePoint and the rest of the MS-Office suite. Give it a try! It’s not just for softies anymore!