#SOOP-7 #pmngt Projects need people. People don’t need process, but it improves chance & speed & size of impact

There are a lot of ironies in the use of methods (for project management or any other discipline). The first is they increase the costs and amount of knowledge required to deliver results not decrease them.

To use a method I need the skills of the job and knowledge of the method. Of course if I start with nothing the method tells me which skills to acquire and the method’s steps help me combine the skills in techniques into a means to achieve results. Methods always cater for a broader spectrum of needs than any specific use and often omit some aspects that any specific use needs so methods cost time and effort and morale

Of course what method do that is valuable is they give us a common approach which aids: recruitment, training, cooperation, tool development, step-wise refinement & continuous improvement, re-use, estimating, verification, auditing, assurance & governance, progress tracking and at the end of the day a good night’s restful sleep!

Also ironic is that when I get skilled those people who know less than me are likely to insist that the method is followed when the most productive route to success is to move on beyond the method’s limitations. Thus methods hold-back the best performers but they bring on the new and the otherwise mediocre.

To prosper organisations need to recognize that adopting methods ADDs overhead until people no longer need the method to perform well and then ’empowering’ and giving freedom returns the greatest value – but in these days of ‘correctness’ is it actually possible to perform/ behave in the shareholder’s BEST interests or just avoid the worst and be uniformlly mediocre? The [most] successful projects use a new approach and that approach is #pm_ngt