Project management consulting and training for social change organisations.
Back in August of 2004, I met and became friends with Phillip Smith, founder of Community Bandwidth, organizer of Social Tech Brewing and co-convenor of Web of Change. Since then, we've had quite a few great, really enjoyable conversations over pints about project management and the not-for-profit sector — about whether or not project management processes are "lightweight" enough to work with social movement projects, whether or not "traditional" project management makes sense on community/volunteer-based and/or open source projects, and so on.
Now Phillip has posted a piece on project management vs. time management, arguing that for not-for-profits, training in the latter is more important than the former because few not-for-profits are in a position to put "traditional, top-down project management processes into practice." Ahem.
While I don't disagree with Phillip on the value and importance of personal time management training in the not-for-profit sector (very different from project time management training and a topic for another post), I'd like to address the whole "traditional- project-management-is-heavy-weight-and-top-down" thing briefly.
When Phillip says "traditional project management," I think what he really means is "bad project management." Not-for-profits do not have the time or money to apply project management processes inappropriately (and nor do/should other types of organizations). But "traditional" project management does not suggest that they do so — according to the PMBOK, "project management is the [appropriate] application of knowledge, skills, tools & techniques to project activities to meet project requirements." If the project management processes being used on your project are too heavy-weight or inappropriately top-down, they are not being applied correctly. And that's bad project management, traditional or otherwise.
projectmanagement, timemanagement, softwaredevelopment, nptech, importantprojects, community bandwidth, phillipsmith, socialtechbrewing, webofchange
Pondering both Rob and Rolf's comments on my suggestion that time management is more important than project management for most non-profit organizations, I was left thinking about the larger issue that each of our perspectives points to... Once distilled down to its essence, my hypothesis is that many people don't have an accurate picture of their available time. I've posted a few thoughts here.
Posted by: Phillip A Smith at May 29, 2006 11:48 AM
