I'm always looking for the good news these days. Here is something I thought might be encouraging ...
Baseline.com listed project management and project portfolio management as No. 9 of 10 on its list of IT trends for 2009. The article said:
In today's time-sensitive and budget-conscious world, getting projects finished on time is paramount. Not surprisingly, more and more organizations are turning to structured systems and software to track all the details. Consequently, project management (PM) and project portfolio management (PPM) have moved into the spotlight.
This sense of hyper-efficiency taking over the business world (mostly in response to what else, but the global economic crisis) could open a lot of doors for project professionals.
Baseline.com listed project management and project portfolio management as No. 9 of 10 on its list of IT trends for 2009. The article said:
In today's time-sensitive and budget-conscious world, getting projects finished on time is paramount. Not surprisingly, more and more organizations are turning to structured systems and software to track all the details. Consequently, project management (PM) and project portfolio management (PPM) have moved into the spotlight.
This sense of hyper-efficiency taking over the business world (mostly in response to what else, but the global economic crisis) could open a lot of doors for project professionals.
Yeah, saw this! Very nice. I showed it to "higher ups"! Always need to show wide spread value of Project Management. I was a little bummed to see that Project Managers were not listed in Top 10 Careers in Demand on PayScale.com.
http://blogs.payscale.com/content/2009/01/careers-in-demand.html
Agreed this is good news. However we still have a long way to be accepted as “professionals”. Too much is discretionary or left to each organization / manager to decide what is “professional”. Although PMI has certainly helped in defining what is “professional”, its application is not ruled or governed as strictly as it is for other professions (e.g. accounting).
Although there are well defined methodologies, tools, processes, etc… project managers find that they have to make some serious compromises on using the methodologies for lack of resources and support to do it right. Well managed projects using these methodologies (without serious compromises) are the exception rather than the rule. Project Schedule management is a good example. Perhaps one out of ten projects will build and maintain a project schedule with known best practices: resource loaded and leveled, sound predecessor/successor logic, identified critical path, actual hours by task by resource, earned value, etc … This is the only way you can tell on a large project if you can deliver on time with the resources you have. If I can make an analogy, in accounting you have to follow certain rules such as total debit = total credit to produce financial statements that are credible. Yet in project management we often have to work with project schedules that are missing some important information to be credible. Balancing credit and debit is not an option is accounting. The same kind of discipline / culture should be used with schedule management. Yet these known best practices for schedule management are considered “nice to have” by many stakeholders or not even understood. It would be unconceivable for instance for a company to produce financial statements without following basic accounting rules. We are not there yet (culture) with schedule management.