Organsiational Behaviour

Over my twenty plus year professional career I've spent thousands of hours performing project management duties, teaching others the discipline of project management, or studying, reading and writing about project management to become a better practitioner.

In some ways I have innate characteristics that are well suited for the profession of project manager. I have a slightly compulsive proclivity to obsess about details - I am definitely the kind of person that sweats the small stuff. While my wife will attest that this trait might be a little overbearing at times, you definitely do NOT want to hire a project manager that does not pay attention to the details. Additionally, I'm an over-communicator - about objectives, about status, about risks that may come or are realized, and about variance (schedule and cost). To some people that can be very frustrating, but in project management - and to me - communication flow is everything.

However, recently I have been thinking that I really only started my formal project management studies a little over 10 years ago. Nothing formal in graduate school, college, secondary school or younger. In essence, while I had the aptitude and disposition for a good project management, I had professional training to fulfill that role for less than half of my professional career.

Studies show that the majority of projects of any type (construction, information technology, business, even personal) fail. Failure can be total - the project does not yield the intended consequences - or it can be partial, in that certain objectives were met, but perhaps costs or schedule overran, or quality objectives were not met. In any case, there is strong evidence in the analyst marketplace that suggests - all things being equal - that project management helps mitigate the risk of project failure across a broad spectrum of industries and endeavors.

So why don't we teach our kids how to project manage? The basic principles of project...