Exploring the role of the project manager

Project, programme and portfolio management. People have been doing projects for ever. The purpose of this article is to explain – from a PMI perspective – the difference between these terms in detail and what standards exist to support best practice, with some real-life examples if possible.

Every person at some point will plan and execute projects. For most, the biggest projects they will handle may be their wedding, moving to a new house or country. Much of this is done intuitively and some will do it much better than others.

However, if you are going to build a pyramid, or the Colosseum, or a new model of passenger airplane such as the Airbus A380, then intuition is simply not enough to carry the project through – but it will still help.

It is not certain when people started calling themselves “project managers”, but during the mid 1960s as business was in the midst of defining itself, some concerned people started talking about what it was that they did which was different from what other business professionals were doing.

In Europe, they formed themselves into the first association for project managers and called this association “INTERNET”.

They grasped that most of their work involved holding together multiple strings, or streams of work with a view to achieving some common goal. That was in 1965.

Since then, they renamed themselves the International Project Management Association (IPMA), and it represents 45 national project management associations.

In 1969, American project managers formed themselves into an association that they called the Project Management Institute (PMI).

The South African Chapter of PMI celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2006, making it the second or third Chapter formed outside of the United States.

The PMI has refashioned itself into an international body and now boasts a membership of almost 300 000, with members in almost every nation. These members interact through Chapters and a variety of Practice Communities that focus on specific areas of practice (for example, construction, government, IT, risk management, project offices, and so forth).

From an early stage, the members of PMI saw the need to become a legitimate profession, and so they started focusing on activities to make it so. This included devising a code of conduct for the profession; establishing what its body of knowledge was; creating forums for discussion and advancement of the profession.

This was not a case of people waking up one day and saying, “Gee, the world has changed, we need to develop a new way of managing. Let’s call it project management.”

Rather, it seems like someone said, “We have been managing this kind of work for millennia, and success is elusive.

“Why? What do we need to do differently?”

The quarterly Project Management Journal (PMJ) is now in its 40th volume and provides a peer-reviewed vehicle for advancement of the profession.

However, the centrepiece of development has been the PMI’s Project Management Body of Knowledge® (PMBOK®).

This document was first published in the PMJ in 1987. In the diagram opposite, it is clear that they saw project management as a completely different but complementary form of management – the management of change.

The first edition of the PMBOK® was published soon thereafter. Since then, it has undergone regular revision and become the de facto international standard for describing what project management is and how it is conducted. In the US, it is also an American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standard.

At the end of 2008, the 4th edition of the PMBOK® was released by the PMI, together with the 2nd edition of the Standard for Portfolio Management and Standard for Program Management.

In some ways, this 21st birthday of the PMBOK® represents a coming of age for the profession.

Copies of these standards may be obtained directly from the PMI (www.pmi.org), distributors such as www.amazon.com, or in South Africa from Project Management South Africa (PMSA).

For some time, it was clear that one needed to look beyond the management of individual projects, and that there was a need for multiple disciplines. Over time, these disciplines and approaches clarified into:

• Project management, which deals with the management of an individual project. A project is defined as “a temporary endeavour undertaken to create a unique product, service or result”. The more constrained projects are, i.e. the better specific objectives and requirements are defined, the greater their chances for success are.
• Portfolio management, which deals with the translation of strategy into streams of work to realise that strategy. A portfolio is defined as “a collection of projects or programmes and other work that are grouped together to facilitate effective management of that work to meet strategic business objectives. The projects or programmes of the portfolio may not necessarily be interdependent or directly related.”
• Programme management, which deals with managing a group of projects, programmes, and other work in a co-ordinated manner to obtain benefits and control that is not possible if they were to be managed as individual projects. Here, the focus is on the realisation of benefits. Programmes tend to require a very different set of skills to projects.
• Project administration, which deals with the administrative needs of projects.
• Project office, which provides the structure within which projects may be supported.

The context of these can be seen in the diagram overleaf. As this discipline has been developing, taking on a clearer purpose, form and structure, it has become increasingly evident that some of the earlier paradigms have to be changed, redefined and even replaced.

Some of these include:

• The traditional career path: At one stage, it seemed that the career path could be project administrator project manager programme manager portfolio manager, with variations and levels in between. It is now becoming clear that each of these is a very different thing. Each requires a very different set of skills and attributes. Rather than being an incremental progression, these are parallel career paths.
• The project office: It is also becoming clearer that this is not one organisational structure. Nor can one type of project office replace or assimilate the specific needs of other types. So, for example, it will always be useful to have site offices in construction projects (and other types of projects that have similar needs). Programme offices similarly are of a transient nature and support the needs of a major programme, while the programme is active. What are commonly known as Enterprise Program Management Offices (EPMO), on the other hand, are typically permanent structures that provide the link between all enterprise projects and the operational side of the enterprise. The author believes that these will ultimately settle down with a more appropriate name like “Enterprise Portfolio Management Office”.
• The need for domain specialisation: Already, it is clear that engineering projects are quite different from pure construction projects; which are quite different from software development projects, or banking projects. The domain in which the projects are executed influences how the projects will be executed.
• The need for specialisation by project type: How projects are managed is also dependent on whether this involves establishing a new capability; renovating something which already exists; or extending an existing capability.
• The need for specialisation by project nature: So far, we have concentrated on distinguishing between projects and programmes. However, already there is a need to distinguish mega projects (like the Gautrain Project or the building of the Dubai fun island). Their cost and risk alone demand a very different approach. Multiple projects have sometimes been called “paint-by-numbers” projects. In these cases, what needs to be done, and how, is well known. The challenge is usually in that many of these almost identical projects are run in parallel. Take, for example, a bank that embarks on an initiative to renovate all of its branches over the period of a year. Repeatable projects, on the other hand, are similar, but are typically part of operations. Examples of these are regular plant maintenance, the production of annual financial statements, regular stock taking, a new listing on the stock exchange, and so on.

Every year, at conferences all over the world, at least one speaker will mention the failures that occur. Attempts at quantifying the cost of these failures will accumulate to many hundreds of billions of dollars per annum.

Whatever the number, it is a major percentage of the $75 trillion that the annual global gross domestic product is currently estimated at. And largely unnecessary. Not all, of course.

Some of it can be legitimately justified as learning fees – research and development, if you like. However, the problem is that the value of ‘failed’ projects is not recognised as such, nor is the ‘learning’ part exploited.

We believe that as project management (the generic term for activities that are of a non-routine nature) is generally recognised and accepted as a parallel but uniquely different discipline from operations management, this cost can be reduced radically.

And it will be, thanks to the growing number of professionals who make up the membership of groups such as PMI, APM, IPMA and PMSA.

At this point, they represent a drop in the bucket – the Information Systems, Electronics and Telecommunications Technologies (ISETT) Sector Education and Training Authority has estimated the total number of people who are engaged in the management of projects of some form or another to be around 200 000.

Right now, our greatest challenge is to share information. This we hope to do through this new magazine and through regular columns like this one. 

The author Elmar Roberg is a systems and projects specialist who has been practising for more than 35 years. Elmar is a PMI PMP; PRINCE2™ Practitioner and Temperament Certified Professional. He is a past president of Project Management South Africa, and a past president of the Computer Society of South Africa.