Have you ever wondered about a very obvious question that most of us give little thought to? The question is "why have Project Management anyway"? Why do we do it? Why do we subject ourselves to the countless meetings, long endless QandA sessions with SME's (subject matter experts) where we, Project Managers are seen as aliens from another planet, lengthy status reports, and requirements gathering sessions and documentation that never seem to get completed?

Isn't it enough for us to just... well, start! I mean, why don't we just forget all the processes, tools and techniques that the Project Management Institute profess is good for us and our projects. Can't we just start writing, building, prototyping, testing and launch... right? No?

Now hang on, some of us are saying "hey, that's what we ARE doing right now". We don't have the 'luxury' of meeting with all key stakeholders, meet with end users, review-review-then-review-again with the client's functional and technical requirements.  Documentation? What documentation? It's all in our Lead Engineer's brain. In fact, it's December and we're supposed to launch for Christmas! We haven't even started and we're already late by two months. I'm sorry, if that is you, then I have a bone to pick. For this post, I'm going to just avoid that string and revisit it in a future post. But for now, we're going to move on.

So without getting deep into the obvious and not so obvious reasons why a good set of proven methodologies is essential to the successful completion of your project, or at least coming close to a facsimile of one that resembles a 'complete' project, I believe we can summarize an answer into one thought.

We need Project Management to manage expectations. Yes, that's right. It's as simple as that. With the countless touch points in today's ever complex projects, with external vendors, foreign country outsourcing, different languages, multiple time zones, constant morphing technologies, people coming and going, it's no wonder that the odds of project failure are great. What are we to do? Can we make a difference to the outcome? Of course we can, most of the times. Other times, no. The one thing that we know we can control is called managing expectations.

What does this mean and how do we do it? The answer is unfortunately to long for this post right now. In my next post, I will investigate what this means and how we can attack it.

This topic is one of many others covered in one of our in person courses, you can find a time and date by clicking here.

Until next time.

W.Beacon, PMP