What Are They All Thinking? Or, Maybe They Aren’t
September 21st, 2002 by HalI just finished reading a short article tucked away in the Sept 16 issue of ENR, the construction industry news weekly published by McGraw Hill, Schedule School to Fill Skill Gap. (No byline on the article.) ENR reports that PMI is creating a school to teach project scheduling to the folks who are sitting at the computer. Why? It seems the scheduling software is so easy to use and inexpensive to run that a large number of people with no experience in project planning and scheduling are creating the schedules. I suppose that education is better than no education. But what are they thinking?
- Do project managers think inexperienced people (with computer skills the PM might lack) using MS Project and the like can create the project schedule they will operate by?
- Do these rookie schedulers think they are producing schedules that can be used?
- Does PMI think that this should continue?
- Does ENR think that construction projects will get done on time when these people are trained in scheduling?
- Does anyone think that, just maybe, the doers need to be the ones engaged in the planning?
- Do the customers know what is going on?
Maybe no one is thinking at all. That could explain why projects take too long, cost too much, and fail in some significant way to deliver on the customers' conditions of satisfaction. Gee, and I thought it was more complicated than that. We just have to start thinking.
Related Posts
- The Best 19 Pages on Lean Thinking Earth Day, Natural Capitalism, and Lean Thinking Earth Day is April 22. (Let's stay out of the controversy on whethe...
- Innovation and Lean Go Hand-in-Glove Joyce Wycoff suggests that one of the reasons companies aren't more innovative is they have become so lean they don't ha...
- Join Us for a Conversation with Jim Womack Join us this week for our conversation with Jim Womack. Jim is the co-author of The Machine that Changed the World an...
- Newest Kaizen Book — by Shigeo Shingo This is not a book review. That will come later. I'm only sharing the news that there is a new Shigeo Shingo book: K...
- Back to Designing Breakdown-Tolerant Project Environments I last wrote about Designing Breakdown-Tolerant Project Environments in a four-part series: [1] [2] [3] [4]. It's not c...
