Ever see a hornet's nest? I have. It happened after my post yesterday. I got a bunch of emails taking exception to my call for making project management a profession. One person claimed I was shilling for the PMI.¹ To set the record straight, I shill for no one. Having said that, I stand behind my call for professionalism.

There are a number of avenues to professionalism. The PMI's PMP® is the best known and most criticized path. For now, I won't go into the criticism except to say, a lot of work needs to be done to make project management a full profession. There is a bigger issue. That is a commitment to career-long learning. Recognized professions take this very seriously. All have a form of continuing education units (CEUs). Members of a profession are required to maintain a level of on-going engagement in their education. That's right, required. It is one of the ways that registration or certification actually means something. Members of the profession are keeping up with the advancement of the profession. It's not a lot of time; for most professions it's about 30 hours of learning/course work/seminar attendance for every two years. Why is this important? Because the vast majority of project management people I speak with don't put in that time.(...)
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Is project management a profession? The experts in the matter of establishing conditions for a profession say no. Why? Most of it has to do with the accumulation and study of theory. I've been on the fence about whether or not we should seek professional status for project managers. I'm married to a registered nurse. Her brother is a registered engineer. My cousin is a licensed physician. One son is finishing his law degree so he can sit for the Bar while the other is studying for the landscape architect's exam. I know what these people have done to become professionals. It's time that project managers do the same.

The world needs project managers who know how and why projects succeed and can create the circumstances so they do.

We live in a project age. An age that I predict will last for generations. Sure, the industrial age was less than 200 years. The information age surrounds us. Some say the knowledge age is upon us. But the project age — this time where great things happen in a project setting — is only going to become more important as companies, communities, and professions deal with the rapidly changing technological environment. The world needs project managers who know how and why projects succeed and can create the circumstances so they do.(...)
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One of my project blogging friends, Bas de Baar, has begun a compilation of his posts that he's calling the Project Shrink Linear Edition version 0.1. It's an unbook. I don't know if Bas is calling it that, but he's creating it in that way. I'm a big fan of his thinking and his writing. Bas hits the nail on the head when he says, "Projects are about humans."

Projects are about humans.

You'll like his writing. He mixes personal experience with stories and just enough philosophy to be interesting, but not boring.

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I've been writing about "dumb" questions. While compiling the list of 45 reader questions I got thinking, why would someone not ask a question? Engaged people, in whatever they are doing, tend to be curious. Does it follow that people not asking questions, dumb or not-so-dumb, are just not engaged?

Have you voted on the Top 42 Not-So-Dumb Project Questions? Please do so now.

Get everyone involved in satisfying the needs of the customer

On further reflection I remembered a very short article in Industry Week (IW) by Ralph Keller. Ralph is the President of the Association for Manufacturing Excellence (AME). He has a monthly column he calls Continuous Improvement. In December 2008 he wrote Engaging the Hearts and Minds of Your Employees. Ralph makes a very familiar case:

Failure to win over the hearts and minds of all of your people will result in less-than-desired results, and will not achieve the sustainable continuous improvement efforts that conditions today demand in order for companies to succeed.

He describes a few of the successful approaches.

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My last post created some interest and a little controversy. I don't think there are any dumb questions among team members. As the cliche goes, only the un-asked questions are dumb. Projects go much better when there is a free exchange among the participants. We all know this. Yet, for whatever reasons, usually having to do with fear, people often fail to ask when something looks unusual. Enron, Madoff, AIG…these tragedies in some way all involve people failing to ask questions.

Help generate a list of great dumb project management questions

I proposed 10 questions that are worth asking on our projects. The list was my list. Not scientific. No survey. Just based on my experience working on projects. A number of people left comments proposing other questions. Some sent me emails. So, let's try something together. I'm getting a book ready based on my project e-tips. It's in editing. I'm not sure when it will be published, although I have it on the front burner. What if we make my list of 10 dumb project management questions your list, but bigger? Let's see if we can generate a list of 42 really good dumb PM questions. (I'll tell you later why 42.) I'm looking for at least another 32 good dumb questions. Once I have a bunch, then I'll create a survey where you can vote up or down the questions. The top 42 will get published.

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Cliches become cliches because there's so much truth in them that they are spoken so frequently. We've all heard, "The only dumb question is the one you didn't ask." But, do you? Ask, that is? Or like most of us at some time or another, are you as afraid as me to look stupid in front of others? Thought so.

Dumb questions are good project controls.

Seth Freeman, writing in USA Today, 1-13-2009, says Ask the 'dumb' questions.

"Danger," he says, "lies in the fear of asking questions. That fear is helping to ruin people and destroy our economy."

Wow. He blames investors (and the SEC?) for Bernie Madoff's long-running Ponzi scheme. One question is all anyone need ask, "What were the trades that allowed you to make money regardless of how the market moved?" Any large fund exercising due diligence and prudence on behalf of its members should have asked that question and deserved an answer. Even the SEC could have asked that question and got an answer. But no one risked asking that dumb question? So what does this have to do with projects? Dumb questions are good project controls. So, let's look at some of the dumb questions we need to ask.

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One of the highlights of the PMI Global Congress 2008 for me was my meeting with Greg Balestrero, CEO of PMI. On the last day of the congress Greg met with the PMI New Media Council for lunch. We had an hour-long chat. We heard what was on his mind and we shared some topics with him. Along the way we got into a conversation about standard practice and best practice. Eventually, Greg let out the "T" word. Let me back up…

The reductionist deterministic approach to planning had outlived its usefulness.

The PMI member community routinely misunderstands PMBoK® as PM methodology. It's not methodology. It is a guide to the generally accepted practices. And it is an ANSI standard. All that is meant by standard is that most people most of the time would do the actions described. It is not best practice. As the New Media Council members and Greg were discussing the usual confusion about PMBoK, one of the council members asked about featuring more best practice at the coming PMI Global Congress. Someone went on to say that we needed research into Project 2.0. It was in that conversation that Greg uttered the word "theory".

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Just a few highlights from the Project Management Congress for you. I attended a 6-hour working session on the Project Management Institute, PMI®, 4-year study on the value of investing in the discipline, practices, and training in project management. We followed that with a 75-minute private conversation with the two principal researchers, Mark Mullaly and Janice Thomas. In short, while only one of the 65 firms studied attempted to calculate an ROI, nearly every firm was able to identify real value. I'll share some of the details in a following post.

PMI Special Interest Groups are dead; long live Special Interest Groups.

Colin Powell was the keynote speaker on Sunday afternoon for a crowd of 3,000. That followed his Obama endorsement on Meet the Press Sunday morning. The general was there to speak about leadership. He challenged project managers to bring leadership to every project team. He kept our attention with one story after another and his great humor. I counted 4 standing ovations. I've ordered his book My American Journey.

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Over a year ago I published a series of postings on the critical path method that produced all kinds of comments and emails from readers. I collected those postings into a two-page article that I published on this site as CPM: Fool Me Once, Fool Me Twice. Shortly thereafter, Greg Howell caught some article in ENR on CPM. It was the usual stuff about project managers just need to learn how to use the CPM tools. In an unpublished letter to the editor (with a copy to me) he replied this way:

"CPM is the tool for you if you believe what you know is more important than what you can learn, and if you prefer being "In Charge" to getting the project done, and if out-of-date plans are more useful than a team prepared for action."

Without promising the project is full of delay. That is waste. And it leads to more waste.

While I see what he is saying, and I think the phrasing is clever, many people might not get why he says it. Greg is indirectly pointing to the stasis of the use of the CPM tools. People don't have the habits or the inclination to keep the CPM schedules up-to-date. Little variations and missing task status can throw a CPM schedule out of whack. Soon people lose confidence and ignore the schedule.

Another key issue has to do with the authorization of work. The PMBoK® says something like, "Work is authorized by the schedule." Authorization is not the issue. Coordination among the team is the issue. Team members depend on the completion of work (prerequisites) so they can begin their work. But beginning work is the easy part. Other team members want to know when you will finish your work. They, just like you, want a promise. Without promising the project is full of delay. That is waste. And it leads to more waste.

Team members can make promises on the work they will perform informed by a CPM schedule. That would be wonderful. But we don't see that behavior. In fact, we see, as Greg so aptly puts it,

"The usual project meeting is a commitment-free zone." The CPM schedule is just one of the excuses for not doing what needs to be done."

What do you prefer? I don't know anyone who would identify with Greg's characterization. And teams need some guidance of overall sequence of work. Bob Huber, Scheduling Manager, The Boldt Company, suggests The Marriage of CPM and Lean Construction in his paper co-authored with Paul Reiser presented at last year's International Group for Lean Construction's 11th Conference. He urges people to use CPM at a high level rather than a detailed task level. Further detail is left to the people performing the work. The result is a CPM schedule that is easy to keep up-to-date and doesn't have swings in it from week to week. People will use that schedule.

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