Disciples of the Iron Triangle: Other People's Guide to Projects and Project Managers

By Christian Schade

A guide for CEO's, directors and middle managers who want to understand the world of project management and the people practicing it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781483560144

Book preview

author

Elevator pitch

If you are a new executive or middle manager in a project intensive environment or if project management is increasingly or suddenly becoming important in your organization, and you yourself have limited experience in this field, this book will help you understand how projects and project managers work.

You don’t have to read all of it, and even if you do, it can be done as needed. It is structured in brief chapters centered on individual concepts or challenges, and each of them contains specific pieces of advice to guide you. The short chapters are optimized for reading on an ebook reader, a tablet or a smartphone during a brief moment on a busy day.

Introductions

1

Introduction

As a CEO or a middle manager, then you are most probably not a project manager by trade or education. You might have grown through the ranks and have come from finance, sales, marketing, product development or engineering, but very unlikely from general project management. There are may good reasons for that, and this lies at the heart of what this book is about.

The purpose of this book is to help you as a general manager to build a bridge across the chasm between traditional line management and the rapidly evolving and expanding field of project management.

This is important, because the tensions between project management and line management is a frequent source of failed projects, and thus of destruction of value.

The book will enable you to understand the terms and modes of thought that are employed by project managers, to understand what makes them tick, as well as how you can support, develop and retain project managers as important strategic assets in your organization and how use them most effectively as resources. It will not brainwash you into becoming a project manager yourself. Promise.

In general, the author has a bias towards IT project management in his experience. This does not mean that the observations are not valid for project management in general. It just adds flavor.

If you should happen to be a project manager by trade or experience, and maybe even not a CEO, then I must ask my project-managing sisters and brother for forgiveness. I will be generalizing a lot in this short book – mostly in order to keep it short. I will also be giving away secrets of the trade. Remember that this is in the interest of a good cause.

2

How to use this book

You are a very busy person and your time is important. That is why this book is divided into bite-sized chapters so that each of them can be read easily during a morning commute. If you read two mini-chapters each day, in less than two months you will be able to interact with project managers on their own terms and their own turf. You will have found pointers for further research and maybe even personal development as a manager. You can of course also choose to read the book in a weekend.

Keeping to such a concept means that the author will have to take a shortcut here and there – such as generalizing things and overlooking the many exceptions and special conditions that may apply. This does not mean that the knowledge you are gaining here is not applicable; it just means you need to use your own personal judgment and common sense when applying it.

Some very important points are repeated across chapters – just in case you skipped a chapter or two.

And then there is of course the super fast track – a considerable part of this book is a cheat sheet of concepts that project managers use and assume that you are comfortable with. This is the Project lingo chapter.

3

Same, but different

Same, but different

Project management and traditional hierarchical management are very different from each other. They are the same kind of substance, but then again not at all. A couple of analogies that can be applied:

AC/DC

Seen as two different kinds of electricity, they both can carry energy into an organization, but that organization needs to be fitted for the purpose. You can’t mix the two without great care and you need ways of transforming stuff from one kind to the other.

In hot water

If you see the two management disciplines as ice and boiling water, they can each do marvelous things like create floating islands or cool drinks, transfer energy in nuclear power plants or boil potatoes, but when you mix the two in the same pot, they lose the unique properties that made them special. They must retain their core properties to create value, even if they have the same chemical basis.

Two tribes

One typical, but very flawed, way of looking at these two management disciplines is as two different tribes or culture that cannot share the same space. Many managers are now learning to master both disciplines, and since project management is becoming an increasingly recognized discipline, it turns out that it is not really a threat to traditional management at all – providing that the traditional managers move with the times.

Speaking in tongues

The possibly most useful way of looking at these two management disciplines is as being different languages. They can co-exist in a person or a culture, but they can also carry baggage with them in terms of world-views or cultural elements. They each have their own traditions and practices. They can be translated, but stuff gets lost in translation, and sometimes the skilled, dual-native translator must create new concepts or links to different meanings in order to translate the message. It also reminds us of the fact that we need to hire interpreters.

Projects

This part of the book concerns itself with the theory and practice of projects in general.

4

Projects are not difficult to define

Some organizations spend a lot of time on defining what is a project – typical definitions are based on general best practice rules tailored to the specific reality in your organization.

Elements in such a definition are often the amount of time spent on a task, whether it is cross functional or goes across departments, whether it involves customers etc.

In many ways