AOM 2010 Montreal (Day Two)
Hi again! You know you don’t have to read on if you don’t want to… It’s my next offering from the AOM 2010 Conference held recently in Montreal.
A couple of statistics to start the day…..there were 9000 people at the conference and 1800 presentations, I attended 38 sessions (that’s only 2% – but trust me I was really working hard to get to so many – they were either 1.5 or 2 hours long – each!), of those I attended there were 6 female speakers (or 15%). Of those 15% only two of the women presented full on papers, the others were there on panels or as discussants (a nice role that I don’t see at any other event). Anyway, that means that substantive papers were presented by women only 5% of the time. As I said, I attended as many as I could but it is possible that the sessions I chose were biased in some way – but still…
Ok, enough of that and back to the conference…
The bleating continued about projects and project managers and it seemed everyone had a story to tell about poor project and program management. (Remember these are management people not PMs and a couple of times I had to stop myself from thinking I’d somehow wandered into an alternate universe because as when I attend PM events there are all these PMs talking about how clever we are – and how successful) How could there be such a huge gap?
I listened carefully and repeat here a summation of what was said – not by one or even two presenters but by lots of them:
- Project and program failure transcends culture, industry, language, geography, education and credentials
- Project management (as credentialed – I did not make up that word – by the PMI) assumes a disconnect between managing the project and achieving an outcome
- Project managers believe they are there to deliver the ‘what’ and that the ‘why ‘has nothing to do with them
- 25% of the world’s economy is now dependent on projects (and some countries are approaching 100%) again, not my figures.
- PM doesn’t work well for virtual teams, and there has been no advance on achieving the virtual PM
- PM’s are too focused on rules rather than delivery
If PM is to arrest its relentless slide into irrelevance (do I need to say again – I didn’t make this up) we need to:
- Own and deliver outcomes – simple
- Get with the virtual world
- Get with the need for softer (people and psych) skills
- Take responsibility for outcomes – including the why of doing things
- Learn to live in the real world of people working on projects and BAU at the same time.
- Learn to focus on delivery rather than the tools and our trade
- Become multi- lingual
- Keep up to date – on business practices not just PM
- We need to join the business, not see ourselves as separate and special.
- Demonstrate value through delivery
- Stop the march towards credentials that don’t appear to contribute to delivery
Well needless to say I was even more down by now and a bit disappointed as well. It’s always the easiest job to criticise but there didn’t seem to be much going on here in the way of positive contribution to an improvement.
So, the next sessions I am focused on are about the latest and greatest in PM education – now that sounds like where I’ll get some positive stuff… I’ll let you know how that goes tomorrow.
Until then, remember reading is optional and being a PM is optional too…
Best regards, Diane