Claude Emond is one of the founders and president of Qualiscope Enterprises, a project management consulting, coaching and training firm based in Montreal, Canada. He has degrees in chemical engineering from Canada's Royal Military College (BEng) and Montreal McGill University (MEng), a MBA from Ottawa University, workshop leadership training from Le Centre Quebecois de la PNL, and is a certified PMP. He has over 25 years experience managing major public and private projects. He teaches project risk management in the Schulich School of Business Master certificate in project management and the PMP certification revision class for PMI, Montreal He is one of the authors of the current PMI Standards for Portfolio Management. Claude can be reached at Project management is often seen as a way to increase productivity in the face of personnel reduction in organizations, mostly associated nowadays with my fellow baby-boomers taking permanent vacation. The final result is that you end up meeting, as I did, a person who works on 34 projects at the same time; a complete aberration.
I do not say that a project manager cannot manage many projects simultaneously, but there is surely a limit to splitting oneself in mind-pieces. I just feel that the overall misunderstanding of what is really a project and of what it really means to manage such an endeavour, as well as the belief you can run projects like operations by standardizing everything, causes these crazy situations.
Recurring operations deal with certainty and maintaining stability in production processes, where cause and effect relationships are very well understood. In these situations, it is easy to change anything into a transaction. Managing operations is predictable “transactional” management, where automatic behaviours are quite efficient and welcome.
However, running projects on the automatic mode, like recurring operations, can be disastrous. Projects deal with uncertainty and promoting change through an evolving process, in which cause and effect relationships are often uncovered along the way, and where you are subjected to many surprises and many divergent perceptions of what is really happening. So transactions and filling out forms won’t solve everything. You need to “converse” your way through; you have to create and manage relationships. Managing projects is hardworking and mindful “relational” management, so your effectiveness is not limited by the number of forms you can complete, but rather by the number of people you can deal with at the same time.
As a former military officer, I learned that my maximum span of direct control was around nine people. Projects are delivered through teams and most authors on the subject today say that a high-performing team cannot be more than 10 to 12 people. So how many projects can a project manager really manage simultaneously? Assuming you can delegate a lot of management/ coordination/ facilitation stuff, and that you have direct relationships with two to three people in any given project, what do you think is the right answer? Certainly not seven, and even less 34!
You can believe whatever you want about “super-project-managers.” What I see in my practice is, that once organizations reach a decent level of maturity in project management, they significantly reduce the number of projects assigned to a single project manager… because they understand what it really means to manage projects.
i http://jrothman.com/blog/mpd/2008/03/how-many-projects-are-you-managing.html
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Adm. Craig Steidle http://www.nasa.gov/about/high...raphy.html was the former Program Manager for Joint Strike http://www.jsf.mil/ and then Program Manager for Crew Exploration Vehicle. These are on the far end of the spectrum. But the skills and experience needed to be successful in that world is transferable to most "Program Management" worlds.
As a former military officer, the span of control can be expanded to a much larger number with the right people and processes.
As a Program Management in defense the number of direct reports is in the dozens on a typical program and for larger program in the several dozens.
In the end tough, Program Management is not the same as Project Management. The "product" of a Program is "projects." The "product" of a project is a just that a product or a service.