Some who think about Project work are “Fundamentalists”. I agree that the basis of their thinking is often justified – there ARE Project practitioners who, by carelessness or ignorance, stray from the basics that are required to deliver a Project successfully. Similarly, ideas like “2.0” can be a useless concept that is adopted in the interest of marketing or of trying to look cutting edge.
There are certain basics for Project success. But, there are some issues with practicing PM Fundamentalism:
- Being stuck in a set of rules (even if we think they always work) does not guarantee that we deliver the best result for the Customer.
- Customers are increasingly demanding – better and faster sometimes mean different techniques and tools.
- Once the basics are covered – Project definition, deliverables, metrics-tracking, budgets, schedule, etc. – we need to be able and willing to move to a higher level of delivery, quality, and speed.
- Why would we limit “what works” to “what has worked in the past”?
- Whatever our PM fundamentals, they sometimes need to be re-evaluated.
I’m not preaching anti-Fundamentalism – that would be fundamentalist in itself. I am saying that many are stuck in a fixed set of rules. Although these rules work in some contexts (and some Customers desire theses rules), lets not paint all Project work as needing to live in the same context under these same rules.