Found this here on project management. I teach general project management and have managed web projects over the years, and this is some of the most direct and best advice I’ve read—and it’s only one chapter from the book. The focus is clearly on IT-type projects, but it looks as though there’s good info here for projects from all sectors.
Anyone who learns anything about “official” project management knows of the Project Management Institute, commonly referred to as PMI. The PMI holds themselves up as the end-all be-all of project management. Implied in their books and materials is the message that doing project management their way is doing it the real way.
Well, it just isn’t so. And if there’s one group of folks on planet Earth who is willing to call bullshit, it’s geeks. The author of the book above, Scott Berkun, clearly operates outside the sanctimonius parameters of the PMI, and would appear by all accounts to be quite an effective project manager. As someone who teaches based on PMI concepts, reading the sample chapter was quite an enlightening experience.
I don’t read Slashdot all the time. I’m a nerd, but of a different stripe, I guess. The comments which follow a post are often quite entertaining. A person who had definitely drunk the PMI Kool-Aid lays into Berkus’ text, essentially accusing Berkun of not being a real project manager and not knowing real project management. The Slashdot folks don’t buy it:
The best project managers I ever worked with never learned anything from PMI. The worst ones I worked with had PMI certifications. Seriously.
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I’ve seen PMIs dash their projects against the rock because they swear the PMI PMBOK tells them their critical path is still ABCD and refuse to face the fact their critical path has chanegd. PMI and PMBOK give software managers a false sense of control & understanding. That’s why us geeks are willing to listen to this guy.
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The PMBOK from PMI is mostly a joke. It doesn’t deal with the problems Software projects have. It looks great for construction or even organizational planning type activities, but there’s precious little in there useful to software. My company spent the money to get 2 PMIs and set up a PMO using PMI “best practices”. The 2 PMIs got turfed in the last re-org and the PMO is being re-evaluated. It wasn’t worth the money because it didn’t help up with the day to day help I needed. Now, I’ve taken a PMI certified course and even was a member of the PMI for a year, but I found the material it provided _useless_ to me in software. Some neat articles about bridge construction though and I did learn one neat thing about monte carlo simulation of project risk, but that’s it.
I’m sure all that PMI stuff looks great on paper and it’s easy to convince organizations to throw fistfuls of money at it. The problem is, they’re throwing money at it in the same way they throw money at advertising in order to try to make up for poor quality products and services.
