Project management vs Paper management

Back in the early nineties I reached a point where I had just one more promotion to shoot for before reaching the end of the (technical) ladder. And there was only one place available in the entire company. So either I stagnated or changed direction. I approached my boss and told him I wanted to go into project management.

"Oh, you don't want this job," he told me emphatically.

The problem was, his job was not project management, but IT team management. We had component-based teams and he ran one of them. His days were filled with meetings, negotiations, politicking and paperwork. He was stressed, frustrated, demotivated and unhappy. He was right; I didn't want his job. What I really wanted to do was manage projects. But in an organisation where such a role didn't exist - hard to imagine today - I chose to stay in a technical role and tried my hand at consulting.

It wasn't until the new millenium that I was given an opportunity to do some real project management (thanks, Ian). It was a nice sized project, a small team of good people I got along with, and a supportive manager. Governance was light weight and command-and-control was virtually non-existant. It was the ideal environment to learn the basics. My (now ex-) wife said to me that she thought I would make a good manager. And I believed her. I studied project management at the Open University and read a few books. I tried to steer rather than control, because it's my natural style. I enjoyed the job.

Then the market changed, my contract was not renewed and I wound up at a major bank with a totally different style and culture. Although the job description was the same, there was now a lot more command-and-control. PMs were expected to plan in detail repeatedly and report progress in detail every week. There were numerous spreadsheets and documents to be filled in, and I got buried in making the project look good. I spent hours and hours trying to make my Gantt chart reflect reality, only for the PMO to ask more questions about what I was reporting. I was managing the reporting, not the project, and I hated it. I had no real control over what I was responsible for. I was, I believed, not a good manager at all.

A friend worked at a company he said was different. They were Agile, he said. They got things done. And he was happy there. So I joined. Two years later, and I am now a fully-fledged Agile enthusiast. Productivity and motivation are so different to what I was used to in Big Bank. We delivered more solutions, faster and better. I was happy again.

I realised that Agile is not only about projects, it's at least as much about the people. All we want to do is do a good job. Professionals are like that, we require little in the way of motivation. Give us a juicy project and the resources required, and we'll do the job and have fun along the way. And we are learning a lot as we go along. Life is good!