“There is no much more about project management than repetition”.
For many years I have studied and practised project management. Sometimes not even thinking or being aware that I was doing it.
During these years I had the opportunity to learn a bit about different methodologies as I was always intrigued by the ways in which projects and organisations can be organised and managed.
However, after analysing them, trying to practice them and learning more about them, I am more and more convinced that there is only one project management methodology and the rest is marketing. And within marketing I would include, using different names for the same thing, using fancy words to reinvent the same wheel, to sell similar books, formations….
In the end, the fundamentals are the same:
1) a project consists of 3 main variables: scope, time and budget (we could bundle here money and resources).
2) You don’t know them exactly when you start the project, but you can make estimates about them.
3) If you alter one of them, you affect the other two in some way.
Project management consists in a nutshell of, i) before starting the project, estimating the different variables and implementing different tasks and actions to follow the project during its execution, and ii) once the project is running, monitoring the differences with the original plan and adjusting the variations.
Why are different methodologies?
In my view, there are not.
The only thing that exists is experience on what needs to be done to make proper estimates and different tools to track progress during implementation. I will try to explain:
I have heard and seen in business cases in MBA programmes that the implementation of agile methodologies was a big change at the beginning but after a while it proved the benefits for certain companies.
If I translate this into plain language that I can understand, I would say: “At the beginning I didn’t know how to do it, and how much time and budget/resources it would require. Therefore, I will do smaller steps and revisit the planning to follow up that I am doing good. Over time, I gained experience in doing it, and was able to better estimate the budget/resources and time it would require.
Another example, I heard at a conference of a famous and renowned consultancy. “Using our methodology in the construction of “mega projects”, we were able to reduce the costs of each project by 2 and we reduced the time significantly”.
If I translate this into the same language “You didn’t reduce the budget by 2 on the next project, you paid twice on the previous one. And it’s OK to do that, since you didn’t know how to do it”.
I once joked about the construction of nuclear power plants. They use the waterfall methodology, but they should use the agile methodology. It’s proven to be extremely difficult to do one on time and on budget… and translated into the same flat language. It’s normal that there are important variations. In the end, there are not many, if any, European project managers who can say: “I have done 5 nuclear power plants”. If a project takes 10 years to complete, you cannot find many experience people that have done several of them.
In the end, all project management methodologies boil down to one thing: “repetition”.
Repetition is the mother of project management.
Repetition brings experience. But people don’t like repetitive things. We have to invent names to make it “unique”.
If wind energy or solar energy projects can be done (usually) without “big” surprises and are adjusted in contingencies, it is precisely because of that. The people who do these projects have a great deal of experience in them. Offshore wind had tremendous deviations in the first projects, as it was a completely new industry. It is becoming standardised, and projects start to be “easier” to estimate.
Software companies that use the “agile” methodology start to see the benefits after a while, because with experience you start estimating things better… at the beginning you need more frequent meetings and to redirect the course, because you are not clear how to get to where you are aiming. But once you know what you need to do, and you have a good estimate of what you have to do, it takes less time to organize yourselves…
But marketing sells better. 🙂
