Project Management Requires a Road Map
“Having a Project Management system without a methodology is like attaching a speedometer to an orange crate; it measures nothing.”
- Bryce’s Law
The principles of Project Management have been with us for a long time. There has also been a number of Project Management software packages introduced over the years, beginning with mainframe based commercial packages introduced back in the early 1970′s. Some of it has been quite good, others are based on sheer quackery. Some people naively buy such packages in the hopes they will be some sort of panacea to cure all project woes; that projects will start to come in on time and on budget simply because a certain tool was purchased. Inevitably, they are puzzled when projects still go awry even with the latest software. I believe there are three reasons for this:
1. Companies are blinded by technology and fail to recognize the human dynamics involved with Project Management. Instead of working with people to successfully achieve their project assignments, they rely totally on numbers instead.
2. Companies fail to consider the total processes involved in Project Management and tend to attack it in piecemeal. For example, there are interdependencies between planning, estimating, scheduling, reporting, and control. Attacking only one of these problems will inevitably have an adverse affect on the others. In other words, companies fail to grasp the comprehensive nature of Project Management and tend to attack the problem of the moment, such as estimating or scheduling.






