What’s Harder? Project Management or Management?
My feeling is that both have their difficulties and a lot depends on the type of person you are. I prefer project management because it offers more variety and interesting management challenges generally having to do with getting temporary teams to perform well. These same preferences would probably be viewed as negatives by others who prefer the stability of managing essentially the same group over time with the power that comes from authority. Still others prefer a mix of project management and management mainly because projects keep life interesting.
Here are some questions to get you thinking:
1. Is the lack of on-going authoritative structure in most projects a problem?
2. Is being a manager in a stable environment dull?
3. When you form a team of people taken from the “stable” structure to do a project, do you have trouble keeping them focused and passionate about your project? How do you do this?
4. How can a PMO and a governance board help in terms of attracting people to project teams?
5. Do you feel that project management is increasing or decreasing in your company? Why is this happening?
Comment on this post- I’m interested in what you think!
Bob, Come on! I grant you that project management is difficult because it’s the epitome of matrix management, but to say that managing a group is essentially boring ignores the true challenge in both—getting a diverse group of people to do what you want them to do better known as herding cats. While I agree that managers have more authority than PMs, that doesn’t make the workers any more co-operative these days.
But thanks, you’ve given me a great idea for a post today:)
Miki- I agree with you on diverse groups and lack of co-operative workers that make management a challenge versus boring. My personal view of authority is that it should be used to serve those you manage. Glad it stimulated a post for you.
Co-operative workers are a challenge, too:) Sure, managers need to serve those they manage, but they also need to serve their company.
Managers should make their decisions first for the sake of their company, second for the sake of their group and third for the sake of themselves. The problem is that too many of them reverse that order.
In a standard hierarchical corporate organization, you have specializations through boxes (i.e., departments, divisions, sections, etc) identifying finance, marketing, production, human resources, etc. Frequently, the specializations become rigid over time and the boxes neglect to communicate with each other (The managers or heads of boxes are supposed to be doing this, but often neglect).
Consequently, integration of all the functions / tasks / responsibilities within the corporation becomes a difficult process. The entire organization needs to be on the same page and move towards the same goal. What you don’t want to happen is one box (function / task / responsibility) undoing what another box is trying to put together. A classic example is the finance department trying to bring down accounts receivable and the marketing department keeps giving credit for corporate brownie points. Or, the editorial section of a newspaper making a stand on an issue or creating a public image and the advertising section keeps going after ads that conflict with the newspaper’s stand or image.
Projects & Project Management bring together managers and technical / professional staff and is a potent form of integrating an organization that has become too specialized. Without any extra effort at all, boxes (departments / divisions / sections) talk to each other more frequently and productively and get to understand what the other boxes are all about. In a project team, the talk is not all about the project and there can be a lively exchange about non-project issues, including relevant corporate-wide issues.
Ren- nice analysis. The boxes analogy helps. I’ve been referring to the divisions as “silos” but boxes better aligns with some current thinking about “getting outside the box” related to innovation. Also, I appreciate your view that project management facilitates breaking down the barriers between departments. One of the first things that one strategy consulting approach does is to simply have all executives learn about the company through various exercises and presentations to each other, especially what all the other departments are doing. This enables executives to do a better job on determining strategies and creates the cooperation necessary to later execute them.
I hope that this is Germain to this post, but here is an interesting post on software project management that has great insight into management, learning failure, and recognizing things that should be changed early on. Enjoy:
http://weblog.raganwald.com/2005/01/what-ive-learned-from-failure.html
It seems that this post is generating some very interesting reaction mainly because it is so broad. The “four things” related to project success in the Raganwald post are great discussion points. My simplification of these is:
1. quality of the people
2. expected value
3. fitness of solution
4. quality of PM and expectations
Quality, value, fitness, related to people, product, and process along with frequent expectation setting helps me “see” this better. My post on creating a compelling marketing offer for a consulting firm – http://projectmanagement411.com/a-compelling-marketing-offer-for-pmo-consulting-company/ – mirrors some of this and also considers passion, team stability and knowledge transfer (among team members and to the client) as things clients want but often do not receive from a project.
Bob – great topic! I think both can be hard, but I’d argue that management is much harder, as there are few firm metrics. With project management, you have milestones that you hit (or missed) which shows you some level of success. Additionally, projects end.
Management never ends, even after you’ve gone home for the day. People live on!
Great topic!
Phil- thanks for contributing. The “projects end” comment caught my eye because consultants tend to like the idea that they can move away from a chaotic situation. An “internal” project manager has to live with his or her results but I agree that, depending on the project, you can get feedback more often and somehow there is less management responsibility (or hardship). I think there are very positive and exciting things about both- “harder” may have been the wrong question.