The Project Book

PROJECT MANAGEMENT

The best projects are made possible by the people who lead them and the environment they create for good people to do great work. These projects are led by project leaders, not managers.

Yet for the past 20 years organisations have focused on method implementation as a means of achieving consistent success. Great leadership, we’re told by the management books, is the cornerstone of success, so why has this truth been missing from project management for so long? The world is full of qualified project managers with endless certificates and letters after their names, yet time and time again they’re letting project stakeholders down.

Project management has to change

Organisations simply cannot continue to see more than 60 per cent of what they do fail every year. They should be angry and embarrassed. They should be looking for every way possible to improve on this record, rather than continuing with the same tired old quick-fix approaches they have used for 20 years.

What’s worse is that there are no statistics to prove that these old approaches even work, except for those produced by the companies that sell them. I’ve read many public- and private-sector project management capability reviews, all of which say the same things:

• Projects lack leadership.
• Project managers lack emotional maturity.
• Project sponsors aren’t interested enough.
• The cultures that projects exist within aren’t conducive to success.
• Organisations are doing too many projects.
• The methods ...