This post was originally published March 9, 2015. It has consistently been a popular post on this blog. I’ve updated the post with material from The Practitioners Handbook of Project Performance: Agile, Waterfall and Beyond  which I put together as editor in 2019 (paperback published in 2024).  The following is the Afterword of that book, where the topics of What is a Project Manager and What is Project Management are discussed.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, I do recommend the rest of the volume. It has an incredible span of breadth and depth across multiple dimensions of project management and project performance. The original post of What is a Project Manager can still be found below.

The Afterword of The Practitioner’s Handbook of Project Performance asks a question that sits beneath everything practitioners do: what kind of field is project management, really? Is it a science with laws, like physics? A social science with models, like economics? Something else entirely? Using physics, economics, and neuroscience as reference points, the Afterword argues that project management is best understood as a field most similar to Law — every project is unique, yet we draw on precedent and pattern to inform outcomes, with the skilled practitioner, much like a skilled attorney, deploying a wide range of tools in service of a specific result. It is a provocative framing, and one that I think clarifies not just what we study but why the field feels the way it does to those of us who work in it.

What the Heck Are We Studying: Projects, Performance, and Laws

We’ve come to the end of our journey together. As practitioners it’s clear we have many tools at our disposal to help manage and improve project performance. Some of these tools feel very engineering based. They are reductionist, atomistic methods focused on quantifying and managing elements impacting project performance. These elements are encased in causal chains explaining and predicting behavior. Practitioners can use these tools to help plan, set expectations, take measurements on project status, communicate and potentially act to change status.

Other approaches in the volume feel less engineering based. They are the fuzzy side of our emotional well being, our mental states. They highlight the value of mentoring, communication based in listening, mindfulness. They discuss the role of positive interpersonal interactions and community. Practitioners can use these approaches for the people side of project.  And projects are, all about people [Phillips 2014]. People decide on projects. People work on projects. People overcome challenges on projects. People innovate. People look back and talk about the performance of projects. 

Project performance is an interplay between and across this spectrum because people, in all their roles on a project, are different. Different tools speak to different audiences and help practitioners communicate and manage those audiences. 

Yet somehow, the breadth of the spectrum of tools, while useful for practitioners, makes the field feel imprecise. Is it a science, with scientific laws? Can people and human actions be understood through the lens of science, be engineered? Before we take our final leave of each other for this volume, we’ll dive into these waters in this Afterword. We’ll use some well formed ideas on criteria for a science or separate field of study  [Popper 2002, Vada 2015]. We’ll look at three potentially relevant domains: physics, economics and neuroscience.  All the while, we’ll keep circling back to reflect on project performance.  

• What is it that we are studying?
• Is there a fundamental set of elements or interactions we are observing or learning about? 
• How do we determine valid explanations of project performance?
• If our predictions are wrong, does that invalidate our theories? 

These seem foundational questions. Can we or should we study project performance without clear answers? 

Let’s start with physics. Physics often comes to mind as the Gold Standard for a field which is unquestionably a science. Physics is succinctly defined as the study of force [Dienes 2017]. This clarity can be encoded into mathematical models. These models can be wildly precise in making predictions. We can bounce the predictions against empirical observation and make claims on the accuracy of the models. We can ask if the theory encoded into a model pencils out. Does observed reality conform to the model? Have we uncovered some way of consistently describing the world around us? 

For the most part, the answer seems to be yes. The dialogue in physics among scholars, practitioners, engineers and others is, I’m sure, as messy as any other field. But the output is wonderous. Witness the everyday marvels of producing millions of cars a year at specific levels of safety, quality and performance. Or, look at the power of the internet connected devices in billions of pocketbooks and pockets around the globe. Or, gaze at the moon and know we’ve walked there. Or gaze beyond and be reminded that one person [Einstein 1918, 2005], deep in the dialogue, used mathematical models and imagination to predict gravitational waves. This phenomena was confirmed a hundred years after the prediction by observing an event which happened a billion years ago, using instruments which themselves are a testament to the wondrous output of the field. 

How well does project performance fit as a field of study compared with physics? Does it matter that we are studying people?

Let’s now move to economics. In the realm of studying people, Economics has an aura of precision. Economics is defined as the study of human decision making under conditions of scarcity [Schwalberg 1987]. Economic theories have been encoded into mathematical models yielding specific predictions. The jury is out on the accuracy of economic predictions of single point events or outcomes occurring in a relatively short period of time. We have yet to predict asset prices at all points in time. Doing so would generate a fortune. We haven’t yet figured out how to keep all businesses in business all the time or keep people happy at work.

Observed reality may not conform to Economic models. Economics may not have uncovered some way of consistently describing the world around us. However, dialogue in the field generates artifacts, a language, a taxonomy that works well with the way we make policy decisions. Economic outcomes on a macro-scale have been breathtaking.  Over the last 25 years more than a billion people have moved beyond subsistence poverty [World Bank 2018]. Many more have seen their material standard of living improve. It is hard to pin this exclusively on the accuracy of economic predictions. It is even harder, though, to say modern economics has nothing to do with it. 

The dialogue around economics seems to straddle a wider audience than that of physics. The line between scholars and practitioners blurs when academics are appointed to government decision making roles or are hired by financial firms to calculate large bets. Like the children’s game of telephone, economic arguments lose fidelity the wider the audience grows. People farther out from the original authors forget the operating assumptions or simplifications which make most economic models possible. This forgetting gives economics an illusion of exactness. This is particularly acute when it forgets the assumptions made on human decision making. It then takes people outside the field, like the psychologists Twersky and Kahneman [Tversy and Kahneman 1974, Lewis 2016 ],to remind us of the existence and frailty of these assumptions, and shake up the conversation. 

How wide is the audience for the dialogue taking place in project performance? What assumptions do we make about human behavior?

In terms of understanding human behavior, the field of neuroscience seems to be providing breakthroughs in mapping how people work. I am not very familiar with the details of the field. But philosophers like Daniel Dennett [Dennett 1991] convincingly use findings from the field decades ago, along with the work of Darwin [Darwin 1871]  and Dawkins [Dawkins 1976], to demystify metaphysical concepts such as consciousness. He paves the way for a scientific understanding of seemingly inscrutable elements of human behavior like our sense of self or the continuity of a consistent, singular self, making decisions and feelings things, over time.  It is gleefully rational and skeptical in the most positive sense of the words. 

The social psychologist Erich Fromm once defined character, the unique elements of each person, as “the relatively permanent system of all noninstinctual strivings through which man relates himself to the human and natural world” [Fromm 1973 ]  We may one day find there aren’t ‘noninstinctual strivings’ and that science can identify and explain all our choices and actions. It may take years to see the direct instrumentalist success of the field. Though neuroscience has begun making its way into project performance [Osterweil 2019]. But the impact is being felt. The field is shaking foundations of meaning and morality [Caruso and Flanagan 2017]. Its promise is both exciting and terrifying.

Are we shaking foundations? What is the promise of project performance?

Project performance holds incredible promise. Imagine if we were able to discover repeatable and consistent methods to create and foster world changing innovation. Imagine the types of medical or agricultural improvements we could produce, with savings in cost and resources. Or, imagine if we discovered repeatable and consistent methods to have happy people and happy communities. Yes, it sounds dangerously like social engineering, and comes with the caveats and warnings of history (as well as that of The Mule in Asimov’s Foundation series). But project performance could paint the path to understand dialogue around specific topics, prescribing ways to parse and mold together the right elements in the right way to deliver tremendous results. These could underlie outcomes we’ve described above such as revolutions in physics, effective dialogues around economic policy and advances in understanding human behavior. It holds great promise.

The question around shaking foundations is harder to answer. Sometimes it feels we are not shaking foundations. We see practitioners making significant impact in their particular environment, in their companies, organizations, on their projects. We see academics having rigorous dialogue in journals and conferences. It sometimes seems the dialogues aren’t talking to each other. 

Zooming out further, though, the world is deeply touched by performance management approaches. Agile has permeated the daily business vocabulary and changed the way people work. Lean, a concept that is decades old, is now applied to start-ups and innovation. Together they have spawned the field of DevOps which has gone hand-in-hand with the rise of cloud computing, creating a revolution in innovation across fields and reducing costs across industries. 

Looking back further, the pioneering work of W. Edwards Deming set the foundation for high volume, high quality, repeatable processes. The fruits of his work are seen in manufacturing in industries including cars, cell phones, chips and candy. The volume, quality and relatively low cost of so many products and services across the globe can be connected to Deming’s work. His work in statistical sampling is also used in conducting the census in the United States, influencing how the very government is constituted. Henry Gantt created an everyday tool so common and practical for talking about projects that people even forget it had an inventor – the Gantt chart. 

Do ideas like Agile and Lean Innovation, or inventors like Deming and Gantt, belong to the field of project performance? Or, rather, are they part of industrial engineering, statistics? Many fields draw ideas from other domains. For example, the psychologists Kahneman and Twersky impacting economics. But what are the boundaries of what’s in and out of the field? Does it matter that the area of impact is now being seen as how people work and discuss projects?  Do we encompass agile, lean, Deming and Gantt in a new narrative of a new field? It feels like we should.  It feels like there’s value, instrumentalist and in advancing our problem solving capabilities, to define the field with a few constants to clarify and answer the questions posed at the beginning of this Afterword. To help answer, truly, what the heck are we studying? 

To get started, I would suggest the following constants for the field, based on observation, practice and research. 

• It is always instrumentalist. We are concerned with outcomes. We are a rich arena to which the scientific method can be applied to study social sciences, human behavior and philosophical concepts. 
• Communication in and about the field spans a wide audience and often requires multiple artifacts and varied communication objects to effectively communicate with the audiences involved. 
• There is always a dialogue between the holistic and the specific. We may sometimes run the risk of seeing a unified whole or totality in which to fit our observations [Benjamin 2016]. But uncertainty and unknowableness will always bring us back to the specific. 
• Project participants and outcomes are always impacted by their orientation towards uncertainty and unknowableness [Phillips 2014].

Let’s also consider project performance as a performative field [Austin 1975]. The words and methods used, the communication artifacts created and theories proposed are there to serve a performative purpose, within a project environment. They are different than logical statements or statements about the world. They are meant to direct or change the world or environment in which they occur. Law and legal argumentation are an example. The performative nature of project performance adds credence to using instrumentalism to determine valid explanations. It could also help explain why leadership is a go to answer and successful area of management studies.  

These determinations, and the projects themselves, are made in a social and human reality. (It is an interesting and elucidating thought experiment to think how the field would be different if we were talking about optimizing the performance of machines). These realities are full of traditions and rituals, in the anthropological sense. There is a burgeoning literature using performative authenticity as a tool for understanding traditions [Phillips 2019]. Many legal systems have enshrined the role of tradition in the principle of precedent, where previous outcomes impact current or future outcomes.

And it is here that we may find a solid perch to rest our questioning. Project performance, for all the potential trappings of engineering and science, may be best understood as a field unto itself, most similar to law. Every case is unique, every project is unique. Yet we try to find sufficient similarities across projects to inform the outcome of current or future projects. This could explain the basis of the case study method used in many business schools.  There is an ongoing dialogue between the holistic and the specific. Threads in one direction or the other are pulled to serve the needs of the project and the practitioner. Sometimes practitioners follow strict interpretations of previous outcomes. Others, practitioners lean in on more novel interpretations. The practitioner, and the field itself, is concerned with outcomes. Current outcomes, future outcomes, reinterpretation of past outcomes.  

Both law and project performance have heavy performative elements. Words are used to impact outcomes rather than to make statements about reality. Both have a wide variety of audiences and require different artifacts and communication objects to speak to those audiences. They can incorporate methods and artifacts of hard sciences and mathematical models, such as forensic evidence or risk adjusted schedules. Or, they can rely on the arts of persuasion, listening and communicating, leveraging interpersonal relationships or power dynamics in an environment and an understanding of the social landscape in which the case, or project, is taking place. Thinking about legal cases which may be discussed in the general public, for example, how much of the outcome depends on accurate statements about physical reality compared to the attorney’s ability to read and manipulate the social aspects of a case?  

Prediction is very difficult in both law and project performance. Much of the outcome depends on the specific people involved. The role of uncertainty and unknowableness may be greater in project performance. Though uncertainty, and orientation towards uncertainty, seem to play a role in how often cases are settled out of court or on the deals parties come to before going to court or before an official verdict is rendered. This may be a fruitful area of research to find cognates applicable to project performance.

Neuroscience or shifting of more and more project work to artificial intelligence may one day make both fields mute. Neuroscience by providing laws of human behavior. Artificial intelligence by reducing the problem space away from human behavior. Until then, there is promise in studying how to create and manage high performing and effective projects. It can help us achieve all sorts of desirable outcomes. 

The content of this volume goes a long way in providing tools and approaches for creating and managing high performing projects. The promise of the field will be even further accelerated through greater clarity and a shared understanding of what we are studying and how we determine valid explanations. I would argue we are studying social, human phenomena where valid explanations are determined within the context of the project, with particular emphasis on the people in and around the project. Universal concepts or Laws of Nature in project performance exist only to the extent they influence communication in and around the project, increasing or decreasing the probability of delivering the desired outcome. As we’ve seen throughout this volume, there are many ways to get things done. It is up to the skilled practitioner, much like a skilled attorney, to use the many approaches at our disposal to deliver high performing projects.

(If you’ve gotten this far, you may be interested in the full book. For easy access, here’s a link to paperback of The Practitioners Handbook of Project Performance: Agile, Waterfall and Beyond .)

 

REFERENCES

Austin, J.L., 1975. How to do things with words. Oxford university press.

Benjamin, W. , Jennings, M.W., & Jephcott, 2016. One-way street. Cambridge : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press

Caruso, G. and Flanagan, O. eds., 2017. Neuroexistentialism: Meaning, morals, and purpose in the age of neuroscience. Oxford University Press.

Darwin, C., 1871. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. 2 vols. London: Murray

Dawkins, R. 1976. The selfish gene. Oxford, Oxford Univ. Press.

Dennett, D. C. 1991. Consciousness explained. Boston: Little, Brown and Co.

Dienes, K. R. 2017, Rethinking the Rules of Reality, Lecture 1 of the University of Arizona Science Lecture Series Rethinking Reality [Podcast] 2 February 2017, Available at https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rethinking-the-rules-of-reality/id1201353127?i=1000380720013 . Accessed 1 July 2019

Einstein, A., 1918. On gravitational waves Sitzungsber. preuss. Acad. Wiss, 1, p.154.

Einstein, A., 2005. Näherungsweise integration der feldgleichungen der gravitation. Albert Einstein: Akademie‐Vorträge: Sitzungsberichte der Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 1914–1932, pp.99-108.

Fromm, E 1973 The anatomy of human destructiveness: Erich Fromm. New York, Fawcett.

Lewis, Michael, 2016 . The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Osterweil, C, 2019. Project Delivery, Uncertainty and Neuroscience. Leighton Buzzard: Visible Dynamics

Phillips, A., 2019 ‘Heirs to the Underground: Performing Tradition in Chicago’s Contemporary Dance Music Community’ Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences, The University of Chicago, MAPSS/CIR Thesis Database

Phillips, M., 2014. Reinventing communication: How to design, lead and manage high performing projects. Routledge.

Popper, Karl. 2002. Conjectures and refutations. Routledge Classics.

Tversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman. “Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases.” Science 185, no. 4157 (1974): 1124-1131.

Schwalberg, B 1987, Introduction to Economics, lecture notes, Brandeis University, delivered Fall 1987.

Vada, Ø., 2015. What happened to Memetics. Emergence: Complexity & Organization, 17(2).

World Bank 2018, Decline of Global Extreme Poverty Continues but has Slowed, viewed 30 June 2019, https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2018/09/19/decline-of-global-extreme-poverty-continues-but-has-slowed-world-bank

 

ORIGINAL POST FROM MARCH 9, 2015

 

I often get confused looks when I tell people that I’m in the field of project management. Many don’t know what project management is as a field or what being a project manager means as a profession. Here are some answers, along with a few predictions about the field.

Project Management is a Young Profession

There are fewer professional project managers in the world than there are medical doctors.

Project Management is a Growing Profession

The number of professional project managers has grown more than 240% over the last 20 years and is projected to continue to grow.

Project Managers are Social Scientists

Project managers apply the science of project management to improve the health of projects. A healthy project starts before it is planned and runs through the full life cycle of the project. Some project managers are practitioners, others are researchers. Some do both.

There are General Project Managers and Specialists

At a general level, the science of project management is not industry specific and provides a comprehensive tool set for many aspects of a project. For example, a project manager can diagnose and treat a schedule, as it were, regardless of the type of project it is.

But there are specialists who focus on one type of project or another, such as oil and gas projects or telecom projects. There are also specialists who focus on specific aspects of a project such as schedule, costs, scope, risks, communication, organizational structure, etc.

Project Management is a Young Science

Project management is a young science. By most estimates it is less than 100 years old. There are a growing number of academics and practitioners expanding the boundaries of the domain. There are a growing number of universities offering undergraduate and graduate programs in project management and even in specialties within project management.

Project Managers are Not a Government Licensed Profession, Yet

Doctors are licensed by the government. Accountants are licensed by the government. Attorneys are licensed by the government. Project managers are not licensed by the government. But that seems to be slowly changing.

The trend is starting in the United Kingdom. The Crown is set to create the official profession of a Chartered Project Manager. This is akin to a Chartered Accountant in the UK or a Certified Public Accounts (CPA) in the US.

I would expect the US to follow suit sometime in the future and create a Certified Project Manager. This may take time, though.  The US began licensing accountants nearly 50 years after the UK did. Chartered Accountants were established in the UK in 1854. Certified Public Accounts were established in the US in 1896.

The Future of Project Management

Project management will continue to grow as a profession and as a domain. More and more universities will begin offering programs in project management. It will become better known as a profession and field of study.

Over the next 50 years we will likely see government licensed project managers in the UK, US and the rest of the world. Some will be general practitioners. Some will have further licensing and degrees in specialty areas. Much like how there are attorneys with a JD and those that further have an LLM in taxation.