Are we all project managers?

Advances in information processing, communications, and travel and shipping technologies are conspiring to make consumers (of all types, commercial, governmental, and end customer) both more knowledgeable and demanding. Moreover, these advances are also increasing the ability of companies to meet those demands in more sophisticated and responsive ways. The result is intense competition, shortening product and service life cycles, and the need for organizations to cast their sensory and operating nets ever wider.

The consequence of all of that is a greater resort to project management in order meet these challenges. Project management has come a long way from constructing static, long-term endeavors such as dams, tunnels, and bridges. It is now used to develop, manufacture, market, and deliver products and services - even information and intelligence - of all types all around the world. Further, the pressures mentioned above are also driving these teams into not only cross-department, but cross-cultural directions.

There are two organizationally critical points following from this (of course, there are lots of points, but these are among the very most important): One is the penetration of this method of organizing work and workers into the organization. More people will be spending more of their time in project management teams. This will inevitably reflect the way organizations are themselves organized: increasingly in order to effectively and expeditiously generate and support these teams. This will have profound structural and training implications, as well as a change in the way managers think at tactical and operational levels, and how they integrate policy and action at the strategic level.

Another involves the background and training of these teams. Traditionally, this field has been dominated by engineers, and the heavily pre-planned, hard-structure approach to project planning and management remains influential. However, the purposes to which project management is directed today are far more rapidly evolving and flexible than in the past. As a result (and also because of the increasing extension of these teams cross-departmentally and cross-culturally), project management needs to be peopled more with members of a broader managerial background, more tenaciously focused on the project’s goals - and less so on its techniques and structure.

It should be noted that women have some special strengths in this area, generally displaying greater focus on end purposes and less on means than men. Men tend to be good at generating procedural and structural solutions that can generate and sustain large enterprises - certainly including complex projects exploring new ground. This is a great strength. However, they also can become caught up in the methodology, losing sight of the goal. It is a peculiarly disconcerting - and all too common - occurence for men to seem to think that projects exist only to generate structures and procedures, the purposes of which are to be complied with.

Women rarely forget that these systems don’t exist for that reason; they exist to facilitate achieving the project completion goal that occasioned their creation. Indeed, they can sometimes regard their male colleagues, embroiled in detailed and passionate deliberations of procedural minutiae, with confused wonderment, thinking that perhaps it is them, and not the men, that are somehow missing the point.

Further, less bounded by rules and structure in their approach to problem solving, women can often produce flexible and innovative solutions that men might describe as “out of the box” thinking. As organizations adapt to the current rapidly evolving environment, women may finally find themselves in more - and senior - positions as project managers.