40 Years!

On May 1, 1981, I walked out the door of ITT Mackay Marine, in Raleigh, NC, and began a new career teaching seminars. For most of the next 40 years I taught project management and related topics, and had 16 books published by McGraw-Hill and AMACOM. My first book, Project Planning, Scheduling, and Control, 5th Edition has been in print since 1991 so for 30 years it has been circulating. It has been translated into Chinese, Spanish, and Portuguese. 

The 15 years before 1981 gave me my real-world experience in managing projects. So altogether I've been involved in the discipline for 55 years. That's 70% of my life!

What has changed about the discipline? Really, not very much. Almost all of the tools existed in the 60s, because they were invented in manufacturing, and we just adopted them to manage the work of projects. This includes the Work Breakdown Structure, Critical Path Scheduling, and Earned Value Analysis. Even FMEA, which is great for risk management, was developed in the 1950s (Failure Mode Effects Analysis).

There are three significant changes that I have seen. Scheduling software that runs on personal computers probably tops the list. The first scheduling I did involved card punch input to a mainframe that was a time-share so it may have taken 24 hours to get turnaround, and if you made a typo, you got a syntax error which could take hours to find.

Secondly, the adoption of project management by software developers, engineers, and other technologists took place in the 1980s. Before that, mostly construction projects applied scheduling to their jobs. 

The other change that I consider significant is that there are now an almost equal number of women in project management positions as men. Of course, this is an across-the-board change. In 1959 when I entered engineering school at NC State University, there were around 5000 total students, of which only about 50 were women. And my seminars seldom had more than a single woman in attendance until about 2000, when the numbers began to equalize--a change that I have been delighted to see, because, quite frankly, project management is a people job and women tend to be more skilled at leading people than men (perhaps that's a biased view, but it is based on my experience with more than 60,000 students).

I quit updating my books following the 5th edition of Project Planning, Scheduling, and Control in 2011. The reason is that the discipline is pretty mature and I saw no benefit to revising a book to just say the same thing in different words. I could have added chapters on Agile, but I don't believe in writing about something I've never actually done, and I wanted my books to be based on hands-on experience.

Well, that's a walk down memory lane. The only thing I want to add is something that Alan Mulally told me, when he was President of Boeing Commercial Airplanes. He said that they didn't differentiate very much between project management and general management. What he meant by that is that the methods for managing projects are perfectly adaptable to managing an entire company, and in my opinion, we could benefit tremendously if we could get every C-Suite executive to follow that suggestion.

That's all folks. Remember, project managers do it on time.

Using Project Management for ALL Work

Imet Alan Mulally when he was CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, and he told me that they didn’t differentiate very much between general management and project management (PM). The reason is quite simple. Those of us who use PM know that we didn’t invent a single tool commonly used. All of them were developed to control manufacturing operations. In other words, all the tools of PM were developed to manage work, so it is the only discipline designed expressly for that purpose.

Which leads to the main point of this article — you should consider using the tools of PM for all work that you do, whether it be mundane or executive. For example, every strategic initiative that an executive manages can be planned, scheduled, and controlled using PM methods.

The basic tools are Work Breakdown Structures, which show all of the smaller tasks that must be performed to do a larger job. Schedules like Critical Path Method to work out what can be done in parallel with other tasks in order to shorten the total time it will take to complete a job. Next is Earned Value Analysis to assess the amount of work that has been completed compared to the planned amount. And then there is Risk Analysis and management using FMEA (Failure Mode Effect Analysis), which came from engineering to determine if a design is going to be suitable for field use.

If you’re unfamiliar with these tools, there are a lot of books that explain them. My Project Planning, Scheduling and Control, 5th Edition is one. The point is to pick and choose which ones you need for a specific job. A strategic initiative may not need a schedule, but simply a to-do list. Keep it simple.

You Can't Manage a Secret

When Alan Mulally became CEO of Ford, they were losing 16 billion dollars a year. That's 50 million a day, 365 days a year!

Each week, Alan held a business plan review meeting, as he had always done as CEO at Boeing Commercial Airplanes. Each week, the stoplight reports were all green, indicating that there were no problems. Finally, in the third meeting, Alan said, "Folks, are you sure there are no problems? After all, we're losing 16 billion dollars."

The following week, one report showed a red light. When the owner got up to speak, the atmosphere was tense. Everyone was certain he was in deep trouble.

He explained that they were having a problem with the tailgate on a truck. When he finished, Alan applauded and asked, "How can we help you?" At that point one of the engineering managers spoke up. "I think we can help you with that. We've seen that problem before."

The next week, there was a rainbow of progress reports, and from then on, they began methodically working to solve all of them.

You can't solve problems in a climate of fear of recrimination. If you shoot the messenger, the person who tells you about a problem, no one else will bring problems to your attention.

Within two years, Mulally had Ford profitable again, one of the greatest turnarounds in history, and done without accepting any bailout money from the government.

You just can't manage a secret!