How many of your projects would you count as successful? I don’t mean successful delivery, though that is important. Hitting budget, schedule, and benefits is vital, but is it enough?
Traditionally, the iron triangle has been something project managers can, more or less, control. This is where we have focussed our efforts – we can track these elements, and keep control of the project, tweaking it when needed.
But… even if you hit all of these, has the project actually been successful? Has putting the project in place actually helped the organisation?
In this way, we move from delivery to impact, or, in more project managery terms, from outputs to outcomes. Now, benefits realisation has always been part of the deal, but let’s face it, a lot of that takes place after the project has been closed down, and the project manager has moved on to other tasks. A PMO may (should) be keeping track of it, for the business as a whole, but are often under-resourced to actually do this.
But the recent changes to the PMP exam have focussed much more on the Business Environment. As they say: “Practically, this means candidates are being asked to demonstrate not just execution skill, but business judgment: the ability to situate a project in a larger organizational and market context, and to make decisions accordingly.”
That reads like project managers being expected to take on more responsibility for outcomes, for the actual benefits being achieved by the business, before you could be considered successful. Now, don’t get me wrong, I think a project that doesn’t deliver good outcomes to the business isn’t successful, but we need to understand who actually owns this.
A project manager has generally been expected to deliver the outputs, with the sponsor or executive responsible for making sure these outputs will lead to positive outcomes. Having project managers who understand these connections better sounds good to me, but we need to understand if this is a shift of responsibility, or just a broader view as they consider tweaks to the outputs.
A project is a temporary endeavour. Making the project manager responsible for the outcomes of that temporary endeavour, which may be weeks, months, or years afterwards, simply won’t work without significant changes in the role of project managers, or changes in where project management sits – i.e. as a specialist role, or just part of an operational manager’s toolset.
Honestly, I’m open to either, but clearly we need to think about this. PMI have updated their PMP exam to better reflect what project managers need to do on the ground. Perhaps we all need a wider discussion as to what this means for organisation and project structures.
Trevor Roberts is a programme and project management consultant and the founder of Dull Industries – a consultancy focused on project turnaround, AI implementation, and digital strategy.