Pat Weaver provides more insight on the issues of Project Management 2. I had not seen Wikipedia article he references. In it Traditional Project Manage is described as:
- Centralization of control
- Top Down Planning
- Authoritarian environment
- Implied structure
- Limited/Restricted access to the plan
- Local access to information
- Limited communications within the team
- Separate projects
- Overly complex tools
- Rigidity of tools
Wow. I didn't know traditional project management operated in this way! Now of course the number one author in the references list at the bottom of the Wikipedia page is selling a PM 2.0 tool based on this premise.
This list, repeated in other blogs and web sights about PM 1.0 attributes is actually a description of incompetent business management, ignorant personnel management, and malicious use of position. You know businesses that are going out of business.
Pat goes on in his post about the reasonableness of the PM 2.0 content of the Wikipedia article. Pat has restated many of the same points I've made and Quant.M.Leap made. My sense is the authors of the PM 2.0 approach defined in the Wikipedia track have somehow concluded all the world are fools and only they have the answer. Yes, ERP projects fail in many ways at an alarming rate in the press.
Of course these PM 2.0 advocates probably haven't actually managed ERP projects or seen successful ones to know the difference between the attributes of success and failure. Nor is it likely they can know the difference between the Boston Big Dig failure and the successful I-25 corridor here in Denver.
It's actually irrelevant in the end
Thank the stars above, no pubic institution or credible private enterprise is going to buy their message "as is" for a simple reason - governance.
Business and project governance. Governance of course does not assure project success. But governance assures that the nonsensical descriptions provided in the Wikipedia Traditional Project Management attributes do not exist in principle. Governance makes every attempt to also assure they do not exist in practice.
So Here's My Simple Minded Conclusion
PM 2.0 will go the way of the first round of "wanna be" extreme programming advocates. Note I did not use eXterme Programming, because Ron had and still has one of the viable alternatives to the "design, code, test" approach of the past - along with Scrum, Crystal, and DSDM. What the extreme programming advocates - those who read the book, but never did the work - wanted was to eliminate all the prep work needed to get in a position where eXterme Programming could work.
The great thing about approach taken my the misinformed, ill trained and inexperienced extreme advocates was they never got hired by any outside firms to practice their voodoo. Same will happen here.
As pat suggests
Beware zealots bearing gifts
