Project Management - Art to the Rescue!

Project Management: Art to the Rescue!

By

James T. Fry

October 22, 2007

Course: ITM533 Module 1 – Fall 2007

Core Prof: Dr. Kurt Diesch

Coor Prof: Dr. Gregory Herbert

"Is project management more of a science or more of an art form?"

Introduction

Today’s business executives are asking their managers and employees “to do more… with less”. Fewer Project Managers are leading more projects with poor results, the latest Standish Group – Chaos Report shows that only 28% of IT projects succeed. Many believe that the key to Project success in not applying technical management principles, but rather, more artful soft skills such as communication and creativity. (Belzer, 2004).

This case study will present and discuss why the application of soft skills will help today’s stressed-out Project Managers implement successful projects. Not only must projects be deployed on time and within budget, they must ultimately bring value to the stakeholder. Often times relating this information to the project sponsor requires creativity rather than a montage of colorful Gantt charts and graphs.

The truly gifted Project Managers are those that can apply the systematic hard skills in an artful manner by using soft skills. To that end, some systematic or science related management skills will be discussed, along with the soft skills and how they are used together to successfully manage projects.

Scientific Approach

Systematic or “hard” skills such as Gantt Charting or diagramming are just some of the tools Project Managers use to track project activities. While they are important to project success they are not the end all. Successful Project Leaders know the winning formula for combining hard skills with soft skills. A thorough understanding of the technical system to be deployed allows project leaders to break the project down into many smaller tasks. Assigning the staffers with the appropriate technical skill sets requires a manager who knows the technology to be implemented. In this sense, the project leader must be technically savvy. Applying a scientific systematic formula to the project provides for effective and efficient use of resources.

Successful projects, those that deliver value to the organization, use proven Project Life Cycle models such as the standard ISO model. (Greer, 1999). Following a “cookie-cutter” approach such the ISO standard is a very scientific management style which requires discipline from the manager.

While a rigid management style may get line items checked-off, it can sometimes lead to failure as the end-user may be intimidated by the strict discipline. For instance, City Hospital in the U.K. had a disastrous IT deployment of an automated system. A post-study found that while the contractor Oracle, had done the proper step of getting end-users involved in the analysis, the users supplied inaccurate data which was used in the development phase and ended up as flaws in the final product. Various reasons were given for the flawed input such as; hurried users, wrong users and users embarrassed to admit they didn’t understand the system. (Brown, 1998)

Following a strict systematic guideline is sometimes self-defeating. That is, leaders and participants can act to avoid failure but don’t for fear of deviating from the plan. (Brown, 1998).

It’s not just rigid planning that reduces project success, it could be the organizational culture. For example, companies that minimize concurrent active projects have better success than those that always have projects on-going or “in the pipe”. (Worthington, 2001).

Strictly following scientific principles doesn’t equate to instant failure. Studies show that successful projects are directly related to thoroughly documented needs for the project. (Greer, 1999). Organizations that perform scientific risk analysis on the personal, technical, and legal aspects have better project success. (Worthington, 2001).

Up to this point it has been shown that strictly apply hard skills to project management can have both a detrimental effect or help to increase the chance for success. The hard skills are the tools, effective application of these tools requires