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I spent some time recently with one of my colleagues. He was running a 3 day project management event for a client based on their in-house project management system.
We came to governance (monitoring and control) of projects. My colleague mentioned something which stayed with me. He said, "Managers seem to spend more time monitoring business as usual than projects". There was general nodding from course delegates.
I decided to test this out with some of the participants on project management training courses I was running. Most of the course participants agreed with my colleague's statement (around 80%).
I wondered why and after asking participants on courses and some senior managers I concluded that managers do not understand the project governance process. What makes me say this?
- from comments it appeared as though there is little or no formal monitoring of projects. When I asked what processes or structures they used to monitor and control projects there was much bluster and few concrete things in place (other than the supply of an intermittent status report) to ensure projects delivered against the plan
- some of the senior managers did not know the role and purpose of project boards they sat on
- stories abound of senior managers who are never available to discuss resource requirements, risk issues, change management issues nor to receive an update of project progress
- several people suggested that senior managers put unrealistic deadlines on projects teams without the resources to deliver them. Because they are not available to discuss this, the project becomes really difficult to manage and deliver
- very few senior managers have been trained on their role as a sponsor or project board member. One I two I spoke to had been to half day overview sessions but is this enough?
Now before senior managers tell me that they allocate projects based on competence I do need to say that many people would benefit from project management training! However, if senior managers could carry out their governance role more effectively then maybe, just maybe projects will have a better chance of being delivered on time to budget and with the right results.
If not…….it's a project risk!
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