Transforming Project Management: An Essential Paradigm for Turning Your Strategic Planning into Action

Foreword

As a Founder of the Project Management Institute’s (PMI©) Project Management Professional (PMP®) Certification and a PMI Fellow with over 50 years in a profession, I am regularly asked to review and comment on new PM books. I have almost 300 in my personal library. These books are authored by some of the most recognized and respected names in the profession.

Occasionally a new author comes along and shifts the project management book paradigm. Duane Petersen is one of those authors. Petersen was a student of mine over a decade ago in Seattle, Washington. He was a pragmatist then, and he continues to believe that project management is not brain surgery!

Duane’s Transforming Project Management is a treatise in back to basics that enables the reader to dispense with all the rapidly expanding jargon and the plethora of certifications. This refreshing book looks beyond the countless acronyms to illustrate the reality of what it takes to be a successful project manager in today’s fast-paced, high-pressure world. Duane and I share the Git ’er done philosophy, and his book will provide the impetus for all project managers, no matter what type of project, to achieve success.

Petersen and I have remained connected over the years despite our separate career paths. I have focused on training (over 50,000 students in 23 countries), while he has taken the consulting path, working diligently with corporations to improve their project management capabilities. He recently completed six years in China where he assisted 7 provincial governors and 85 bankers in implementing efficient and cost-effective project management processes.

This book, like no other I have read, focuses on the importance of following the established project management process and using the proven tools and techniques to establish the foundation for creating decision support information, while executing the responsibilities of the project manager and his or her team.

In some cases, Petersen pulls concepts from industrial engineering and business techniques based on his MBA. He establishes some new methods that take project management in new directions to increase the likelihood of success. Petersen pulls back the curtain on the PM process and presents the material in an easy-to-understand format.

This book may well become the bible for any aspiring project management practitioner.

Lee R. Lambert, PMP, CEO

PMI Fellow 2009

PMI Professional Development Provider of the Year 2007

PMI Distinguished Contribution Award 1995

Foreword

The Difference Between Project Management MBA, PMP, and Pinnacle Strategist

My great-grandfather, around 1920, was a successful cattle rancher and wheat farmer. He frequently had enough money to buy new equipment and one day decided to buy an automobile as his new piece of equipment. What was that? He didn’t exactly know what it was but ordered one anyway. When it arrived at the hardware store, the clerk told him he had no idea how to drive one of those contraptions, but there was a little instruction booklet my great-grandfather could read that might help. Even though my great-grandfather couldn’t read, he got the basic idea of how to operate it from looking at the pictures. Besides, how hard could operating his new contraption be?

When he arrived at his ranch, he decided to park his new car in the barn. The entire ranch staff and many of his friends watched as he proudly drove his brand-new automobile into the barn.

Unfortunately, things did not go as smoothly as he thought they would. When he tried to slow down, he accidentally stepped on the gas pedal. Oops! As the car sped up, he panicked and frantically tried to remember where the brake was. He forgot that his car didn’t have any brakes. In sheer desperation, he pulled back on the steering wheel and yelled, Whoa! That didn’t help either. Instead of stopping, his car sped up and crashed through the back wall of the barn and ended up in the middle of the wheat field behind it. His only accomplishment was that he had managed to simultaneously destroy his car, wreck his barn, and humiliate himself in front of his family and friends.

Project management has a similar history, though not as well developed. When I first started in project management back in the 1980s, the only qualifications for being a project manager were that you had to have nothing else to do and no valuable skills in any other area. Really, how hard could it be? Not nearly as hard as operating a Model T with no instructions.

Then people started to realize that project management might be more complicated than previously thought. Some education might be necessary, so they invented requirements documents and functional specifications. The idea was that each requirement identified a goal to be accomplished by the project, and each functional specification was the part of the plan that would accomplish that particular goal. Sound good? It was a much-needed improvement.

Then the business schools decided to start teaching the basic theory behind project management. Thus, we came up with the standard waterfall methodology of planning everything in extreme detail, no matter how many centuries it took and how many millions of dollars were wasted.

Next, people started to realize that project management was more of a science than previously thought and should be treated as such. So business schools started teaching this in their business school courses. But only just a bit. Next, it was realized that project management needed its own emphasis as part of an MBA program, so you could also get a good foundation in project management theory. That is the degree I have. It is a good foundation of the theory of project management, but after graduating with my MBA, I still felt a bit like my great-grandfather driving his new automobile away from the small-town hardware store with only his little booklet to rely on for guidance.

Even though my MBA with a PM focus was a big jump from the chaotic mess I experienced earlier, the PMP education and credentials I received next were another giant leap forward in organizational theory. Now I was starting to really understand more about how projects should be organized and managed.

My PMP training contained many extra parts of project management that were not included in my MBA program. I better understood how all the parts fit together: a design document, communications plan, requirements traceability matrix, risk register, and stakeholder register, along with how to make a budget, how to develop a schedule starting with good requirements, etc. This went far beyond my MBA program, which just taught basic concepts like the work breakdown structure, the network diagram, and the Gantt chart.

Even though I had made the leap from the basic MBA concepts to the more advanced PMP concepts, I still felt there must be more to come. There is still a huge leap between PMP certification and the harsh reality of trying to competently manage a large project. All this training and education, and I still had no understanding of how to accurately make a budget or schedule that I knew would work. With everything I’d learned, monitoring was still a joke.

It is not enough to have an MBA and pass the PMP exam. We need to be able to successfully manage a project on schedule and under budget with high quality while pleasing our customers by triumphing over all the potential pitfalls associated with project execution. Suddenly, driving a Model T with no instruction is beginning to sound a bit simpler.

In my never-ending effort to improve myself and become one of the best, I read this book and became the first person to take and pass the certification examination described in the book. The exam is not at all easy, as it involves essays and requires an 80 percent score to pass. Now all the confusion and frustration have evaporated. I now know precisely how to create that realistic schedule and budget and how to monitor it precisely! I’ve also learned much more about contracting and many other techniques to be the best project manager I can be. Yet it’s much less expensive and more condensed than I could have expected.

Now project management has transformed, to use the automobile example, from that Model T with its little instruction booklet to a fully automated car that drives itself.

Robert Hughes MBA, PMP

Pinnacle Strategist

Introduction

Companies make huge mistakes every day, resulting in project failures all over the world. These mistakes stem from poor strategic planning, improper execution (project management), and/or poor leadership. Now is the time to stop the carnage and use a unique approach to discover the underlying causes of project failure, resolve those issues, and prevent future blunders.

An article in the March 2017 Harvard Business Review estimated the cost of IT project failure in the world at $3 trillion annually. Add all other types of project failures, and you’d have to multiply that number almost unimaginably. This book is directed at those who want and expect more from strategic planning and are tired of projects that decimate their budgets and professional reputations. Business leaders should be able to know precisely how much a major project will cost before it begins and have processes and tools to monitor how well the project is meeting benchmarks along the way. Taxpayers and politicians must be able to determine the true cost of an endeavor they have been entrusted to vote on and be able to hold subordinates accountable for cost overruns. Bankers and investors need to know precisely what an effort should cost to fund and be able to hold borrowers or company executives accountable. Adequate monitoring with meaningful metrics might even enable lenders to pull the plug on a project before it goes on life support and costs the organization a fortune.

All of this can happen when a project manager follows the methods outlined in this book. For that reason, our target market includes business leaders, project managers, concerned taxpayers, politicians, bankers, and investors as well as educators concerned with producing the next generation of business leaders. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand this, but the rewards to businesses and the people who can help them will be significant.

Let’s examine the current situation.

The Project Management Professional (PMP) designation from the Project Management Institute (PMI) is considered the gold standard for project managers for good reason. The industry was chaotic, with each project manager attempting to invent and then reinvent the wheel with each different project. PMI brought order out of the chaos and set standards to be followed to vastly improve the industry, which are tested with the PMP examination. My point is that those standards do not go far enough to enable projects to be successful. Enabling that success is a major focus of this book.

Adherence to PMI principles is responsible for many failures because PMI bases everything on the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), which is inadequate. It is lacking because it doesn’t describe properly how to develop an adequate budget or schedule and because PMI monitoring techniques only describe how to monitor part of the budget. These are critical issues necessary to ensure project success, which immediately leads us to this question: What exactly is success?

Definition of Success

Satisfactory completion of all work necessary within the budget and schedule as agreed without requiring the addition of any time or money to make up for failure.

How can people be successful meeting this criterion if they do not understand how much money or time that project will take? Also, present monitoring techniques do not display how well the project is performing against that budget or schedule. Again, projects are launched with inadequate budgets and schedules because of lack of adequate processes, and monitoring cannot provide an adequate picture of how the project is proceeding against the budget and schedule because PMI monitoring processes do not consider all types of costs. Therefore, project managers simply don’t have the tools to successfully deliver projects. So if successful delivery of a project means producing the results of the project for the budget and schedule agreed to—and your budget and schedule cannot adequately reflect what’s necessary to make that happen—how is success currently possible? This is a serious flaw.

Further, status reports about how projects are progressing against their schedules and budgets are made using tools inadequate for that intended purpose because they track only part of the total cost of a project. Also, more than 8o percent of project management status reports use totally subjective stoplight colors of green, yellow, and red to indicate whether the project is proceeding on time and budget with no realistic idea of whether any of the report is accurate. This means organizations cannot understand the magnitude of a project’s failure until long after the project has been completed. The organizations must then find a way to survive the ensuing mayhem and finger-pointing.

For example, one of my customers came to me after 2010, when its company had a project budget of $1.2 billion and discovered it had actually spent $3.1 billion—yet all project status reports indicated the projects were proceeding successfully on schedule and on budget. This kind of chaos is replicated throughout business and government entities daily (yes, directly due to those subjective green lights). In 2017, the Beijing News reported that an audit had revealed all projects in one of the provinces had failed dismally during 2012, and a team was being sent to identify the causative problems. Yes, it took five years to determine the full impact of project failures, let alone discover what might have been done to avoid them. Many organizations never even bother to look at that type of information, out of fear of what might be disclosed.

Is it any wonder why, as a neophyte project manager, I was told the final step for any project must be the bayoneting of participants? Sadly, I learned how true that statement was. The company I was with regularly terminated all but one participant at project completion, so the last person standing could aim the finger of blame in another direction.

Further, the PMP—that gold standard for project management—is awarded to candidates who successfully pass PMI’s Project Manager Professional examination, yet who may have never had any actual experience managing a project; project expeditors with no decision-making authority and project coordinators with limited decision-making authority can use those experiences to sit for the exam, and if they achieve a 60 percent score on a multiple-choice examination, they pass. First, I’ve never experienced any examination where a 60 percent score represented anything other than failure. Second, in an examination with four multiple-choice potential responses for each question, random answers would give a score of 25 percent. For people to pass, they need to know just 35 percent of the answers, in addition to having reasonable luck.

Therefore, the examination is based on inadequate standards because of the lack of adequate processes to determine accurate budgets and schedules and monitoring. The examination requires no project management experience to take. This is combined with a passing score that anywhere else would be considered failure. This results in the designation of PMP, the gold standard for project management!

In contrast to PMI, UltiMentors, the company I founded, offers a Pinnacle Strategist designation. It certifies that the people who earn this designation have all the education and training they need to be an expert in leadership, strategic planning, and project management. Understanding this book, thoroughly, is all you need.

I also have no educational requirements other than what is provided in this book. An MBA or higher can be recommended on its own merit, and as an MBA, I will always encourage additional education.