Good Project Management – just luck?

June 28th, 2007 by Carmen Schubert

Wayne Turk from the IT Manager’s Journal raises in his article the question whether good project management is an art, science or just dumb luck. This is a good question. He argues that it would be actually a little bit of all three. Project Management requires flexibility and creativity – this can be counted as art-, but there are also some rules to follow which belong to science. Luck helps, but is not required in my opinion. Wayne Turk is listing 15 key principles for good project management, and all of them are very valid (although some are very IT specific). It is no guarantee for success, but by following these principles you might come a bit closer to it.

Referencing all principles would take too much time – and you have probably other things to do – so let me just focus on two or three of them that from my point of view are worth talking about in more detail.

- “Three primary objectives – cost, schedule and quality – must be top concerns.”
Project success is measured by the completion of the project with having the results on time, within the budget and on a high-quality level. It is not always possible to put this objective into practice but you should try, otherwise the project will fail.

- “Set priorities; then re-examine them periodically.”
Setting priorities is essential in project management, especially if you have several projects running at the same time. Place the project with the highest priority first and then the ones with the least priority.

- “Good people with the right tools can make or break a project.“
Having the right tool will definitely contribute to the success of a project, but having good people is more important (And excellent people usually start to make their own tools, if they do not have the right ones…). A proper management software combined with the right methodology brings you already a long way.

If you do not have the time to read through Wayne’s article, here is my one-line project management guideline:

“Project Management: Managing Risks and Expectations”

All other details basically follow automatically once you take these two aspects very serious. E.g. cost, time, quality: what does the customer expect, what are the risks associated with it? How can you ensure that the actual expectations are in line with the project progress?

These are topics of two upcoming articles on “Risk Management” and “Expectations Management”.