I started writing this blog to explore the challenges I had scaling PM methodologies down to the scale of projects I typically ran and worked on. Every training or book that I studied on Project Management, including perhaps most of all the PMBOK itself, included processes, perspective, methods, and tools scaled for a trip to the moon and back. All I wanted to do was organize us passing the quality management certification again this year. And that scaling was challenging — is challenging.
I had a conversation today that made me realize that we also can struggle in our project organizations with scaling up. One of our sites has been running successful projects for years. It’s not a tiny or a huge site. The projects have been continuous improvement kinds of projects. They’ve got the scale just right for their work, now, and can go about things rather relaxed because everyone knows the players, knows the technical environment, and knows the compromises and accomplishments of past projects.
But now that team is part of a larger organization as a result of a merger. And now they have to accommodate new risks and complexity: larger projects, implementation projects instead of continuous improvement projects, new players, new organizational rules, new systems, new sites, new business realities.
This project team now has to recognize that it has to gear up again — or scale up again — to handle these larger, riskier projects that tackle the unknown. And that can be awkward. You can be a really good PM, but if you’d not had to have a roles and responsibilities discussion in 5 years, it might be awkward. Or even a project approach conversation: waterfall or scrum. Do you even know what hybrid methodology you settled into (successfully!) in the last few years? Can you adjust it if you don’t really know what “it” is?
It’s not a recipe for failure, no. But it could be if we don’t adjust.
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