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The Profession of Project Management
May 17, 2008 | Author: admin | Filed under: Project Management Musings
The Profession of Project Management
By Dr.Russell Archibald
There is continuing discussion within the PM community of practitioners, consultants, teachers, trainers, authors, researchers, editors, publishers, software vendors, and the associations that have taken charge of the several PM bodies of knowledge, certification, accreditation, standards development, ethics, and PM maturity model development and application, regarding whether or not PM is or will ever be a true ‘profession.’
David Pells has said “Contrary to ‘PM as a Profession’, I have recently come to the conclusion that project management must now be understood and promoted as a ‘core competency for every executive in every organization’. The direction our ‘profession’ must now take, in my opinion, is to show that the benefits of professional PM are so profound and wide spread that they should be embraced by every professional, every executive and every organization. Management by projects is no longer a choice but a practical reality in a competitive world. Enterprise PM and Portfolio PM are simply steps toward a more mature and more profitable enterprise. To survive and/or to prosper, every executive must understand how to organize, plan and complete projects. These opinions are based on my research and thinking during the development of two recent papers (for Russia/IPMA in June and the IPMI in Ireland) on the subject of how ‘modern project management makes money’ for professionals, project managers, program managers, CEOs and organizations. It is the bottom line and, in my opinion, overwhelming logic” (Pells 2003).
David Curling has expressed a similar opinion, recently saying that “I wrote on the ‘Globalization of the Project Management Profession’ and presented the paper to PMI in Chicago [in 1998] and to some local PM organizations. Most were horrified when I declared that PM was not a profession but a business discipline and I had some difficulty in seeing that it would ever become a profession. That is, I felt that project management was simply a sub set of general management and there was little probability of ‘General Management’ becoming a ‘legally based profession’” (Curling 2003). Roberto Morales (2003), Dean of the National University of Engineering in Peru, captured the essence of this current thinking when he recently stated that “Project management is a way of life for all professionals.”
Dr. Russell D. Archibald, PhD (Hon), MSc, Fellow PMI and APM/IPMA, PMP, is one of the six founding members of the Project Management Institute. Now semi-retired, he has many years of management experience in engineering and operations with a variety of major US corporations in Europe and South America as well as the US. He has made major contributions to the understanding of project management, is author of the best selling 2003 book “Managing High-Technology Programs and Projects” (published also in Russian, Chinese, and Italian), has trained more than a thousand program and project managers and project specialists around the world, and has consulted in project management to clients in 14 countries on 4 continents. E-mail: russell_archibald@yahoo.com. Website: www.russarchibald.com.
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Hi Russ,
Just stumbled on this article. Hope all is well?
In researching additional materials for a book I am writing, I keep coming back to Peter Drucker, who didn’t differentiate ANY kind of management- Essentially, Drucker (despite misleading titles written by people other than he) did not even view GENERAL management as a profession, but (correctly so, IMPO) as a process or methodology.
Another early researcher on the topic, French mining engineer Henry Fayol, essentially defined much of what we now know as project management, however, like Drucker, Fayol too did it in the context of GENERAL, not project management.
Bottom line on all this, I think at least a few of the professional organizations purporting or pretending to represent the “voice of the practitioner”, have tried to make something out of nothing. After all, when you take project management, and add in portfolio and program management, haven’t we come full circle to general management again?
BR,
Dr. PDG, back in Jakarta