Would we expect our children to pass school or university exams without tuition?  Would we expect our sports teams to do so well without training?  And so on!  You get the drift.  Why then do we expect people to be able to manage projects without guidance and training?  Madness!

I guess in answer to the “why” question I pose here, we believe that project management is easy enough.  If project management is easy enough, why do so many projects get in trouble?  Maybe that is a series of blog articles – the “cost of not doing Project Management well”.  If you have any stories then please do tell and contribute.  Maybe if we had more evidence of the cost of “failure” then we would have more attention paid to doing project management well.

There certainly are plenty of standards and associations (for example, PMI’s PMBOK or PRINCE2) – but maybe they are a bit high end for mere mortals who do not see project management as their main job.  Most Project Managers manage projects to get their main job done, while only a few see Project Management as their job.  So if most people who manage projects are not fully signed up and trained projects managers but they are P-MBA’s (Project Managers by Accident) as a colleague claims, how can we help and what must we do?

I believe we need to give these “accidental project managers” some training and some guidance.  To that end we at BrightWork wrote a simple guide for these “accidental project managers”.

The intention of the guide is to deliver an easy to follow and simple to use guide for Project Managers who are not yet formally trained in Collaborative Project Management and who do not yet have the time or budget to get trained.

The guide describes the typical stages, steps and sub-steps involved in starting, setting up, managing and closing a typical project. The guide also has a section on Project Management Leadership style.

Note, whilst experienced project managers may find the guide to be introductory in nature, they may learn something from it and might find it an especially useful starting point for creating internal training for their new project managers.

You can get access to the guide and also a webcast explaining the guide here

We’d love your feedback on the guide – just email cpm @ brightwork . com