Despite the considerable collection of books on Project Management (PM) and related methodologies, and the fact that projects are inherent endeavors in professional as well personal life (setups that would give in theory people the environment and exposure to different project types), people’s understanding on what it takes to plan and execute a project seems to be narrow and questionable sometimes. Moreover, their understanding diverges considerably from common sense. It’s also true that knowledge and common sense are relative when considering any human endeavor in which there are multiple roads to the same destination, or when learning requires time, effort, skills, and implies certain prerequisites, however the lack of such knowledge can hurt when endeavor’s success is a must and a team effort.
Even if the lack of understanding about PM can be considered as minor when compared with other challenges/problems faced by a project, when one’s running fast to finish a race, even a small pebble in one’s running shoes can hurt a lot, especially when one doesn’t have the luxury to stop and remove the stone, as it would make sense to do.
It resides in the human nature to resist change, to seek for information that only confirm own opinions, to follow the same approach in handling challenges, even if the attempts are far from optimal, even if people who walked the same path tell you that there’s a better way and even sketch the path and provide information about what it takes to reach there. As it seems, there’s the predisposition to learn on the hard way, if there’s significant learning involved at all. Unfortunately, such situations occur in projects and the solutions often overrun the boundaries of PM, where social and communication skills must be brought into play.
On the other side, there’s still hope that change can be managed optimally once the facts are explained to a certain level that facilitates understanding. However, such an attempt can prove to be quite a challenge, given the various setups in which PM takes place. The intersection between technologies and organizational setups lead to complex scenarios which make such work more difficult, even if projects’ challenges are of organizational rather than technological nature.
When the knowledge we have about the world doesn’t fit our expectation, a simple heuristic is to return to the basics. A solid edifice can be built only on a solid foundation and the best foundation in coping with reality is to establish common ground with other people. One can achieve this by identifying their suppositions and expectations, by closing the gap in perception and understanding, by establishing a basis for communication, in which feedback is a must if one wants to make significant progress.
Despite of being explorative and time-consuming, establishing common ground can be challenging when addressing to an imaginary audience, which is quite often the situation. The practice shows however that progress can be made by starting with a set of well-formulated definitions, simple models, principles, and heuristics that have the potential of helping in sense-making.
The goal is thus to identify first the definitions that reflect the basic concepts that need to be considered. Once the concepts defined, they can be related to each other with the help of a few models. Even if fictitious, as simplifications of the reality, the models should allow playing with the concepts, facilitating concepts’ understanding. Principles (set of rules for reasoning) can be used together with heuristics (rules of thumb methods or techniques) for explaining the ‘known’ and approaching the ‘unknown’. Even maybe not perfect, these tools can help building theories or explanatory constructs.
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