Thanks for this link.

I think the survey makes my points adequately. All classroom and standardized courses, fully accredited, blah blah.

Nothing about how to respond to Murphy’s Law I suspect. But the devil, as every experienced project manager will tell you, is in the details.

Plus I wanted to suggest that people like Dick Boland, for one, who has worked with architectural partnerships, and others who have worked with film companies, know lots and lots about PM – yet seem to have had little impact on the discussion of how it does, or does not, differ from what we teach as the principles of management.

Project management as opposed to ?? organization management ?? Temporary management as against permanent management ?? What exactly do we theorists think is different. The engineers and MIT folks have no different. For them life itself is a series of projects and so long as you are winning a few more than you are losing, you are ahead.

As a young engineer I was always involved in project management – an entire nuclear submarine on one occasion. Is it different from managing ‘an organization’ ?? If so how ?? Interesting question.

As Vladimir and ChrisA imply, project management teaching – as opposed to the doing is mostly about planning with maybe some selection thrown in. Even a tad of political theory.

You cannot give a PM course without presuming enough certainty in the process to make planning the principal discipline.

Yet is this what ‘real’ projects are about – obviously not. The difference between planning in the classroom environment and keeping the real project moving forward in the real and messy world – spite of mega-Murphy events from ‘unk-unks’ to deliberate attempts to mislead on the part of the sub-contractors – is what ‘real’ project managers do. Anyone here have a house built?

Training people to use a PM software package, in the belief that that is where the challenge lies, is deliberately hoodwinking them into ignorance. All bait and no switch is you ask me.

If that is the core of the course, it’s a waste of both money and time, but also a deliberate attempt to mislead the students.

How can we teach project management under conditions of uncertainty?? Aye, there’s the rub. Anyone that cracks that one is sure to become rich and famous, although not published in our journals.

On this note I have to say I heard the most compelling talk on project management in many decades – I was going to say years – at ESADE in May. It was given by Hans Siggaard Jensen:

http://www.interdisciplines.org/people/authors/hans_siggaard%20jensen

Anyone really interested in the management of real projects could do themselves a favor by contacting him. The stuff doesn’t publish well – but on the other hand the stuff that publishes well doesn’t relate to the real PM’s problems.

http://web.mit.edu/engineering/news/BP-Projects.html

It is a year long executive education course. The students are real world experienced project managers, dealing with multi-year, multi-billion dollar projects in difficult environments. You don’t need to teach these guys about gantt charts and critical paths, what is taught there is management skills and the technology of management as applied to projects. There are multiple spin off academic reasearch projects resulting from the collaboration.

I think engineers should have the possibility to take a course akin to an MBA course for managers. My undergraduate degree equipped me with good technical skills and a fair amount knowledge of what to expect in the industry in terms of teamwork and project management.

But once you get into a real job you soon see that there’s more to be learned on the latter part. New “non-technical” questions begin to pop up and you may feel a need to sit back and reflect. This is where a follow-up course on project management, specifically tailored for engineers, could come handy.

We often investigate project failures and report lessons learned. I wrote about one case recently.
http://badmomgoodmom.blogspot.com/2007/06/bohrbugs-and-heisenbugs.html

Good point (sheepish grin). How about, “Not trying to ram a pet theory down everyone’s throat just because I wrote a paper on it”?

Which reminds me, have you seen Little Miss Sunshine?

I probably was a little too easy on the Casson definition of a project. But even if specific resources aren’t tied to the project, there has to be some idea about the size and shape of the resources that will need to be applied. A total budget is the simplest version of such an idea. So if you apply a little poetic license to it, that problem with the defintion fades somewhat.

“Unfortunately, once I started looking into academic treatments of these issues, I found that everyone seems to be trying to turn a pet theory into a consulting career. ”

Do you have a better business model?