There was a time when the workplace was different. Some people were rigidly trained in project management, and the other people did what they were told. That’s changed. By the year 2020 half the workforce will be millennials. These are people who entered the workplace after the year 2000. By and large these folks come to the job expecting to work for a purpose and not a hierarchy. They understand what’s happening. They’re willing and able to contribute to the projects.
There needs to be a way to tap into the talent of these new people, who desire to help with the projects. This is where collaborative project management (PM) comes in to play. Collaborative PM has transformed from the old command and control structure: “You’ll do what I tell you!” Proper project management, real project management, exciting project management is about collaborative PM. It’s people working together, enjoying the journey on the way to a mutually-agreed upon destination.
Implementing Collaborative PM
Collaborative PM is the way to go, but it’s difficult. Project success is, understandably, important to organizations. Organizations often need guidance on how to deliver collaborative PM.
The challenge is, even when you give an organization an approach, success isn’t assured. It’s one thing to understand a project management approach. It’s an entirely different thing to live it. In order to live it, you have to practice it one day at a time. You have to change from where you are and move to a new place where you’re doing something different.
Want more? Éamonn McGuinness shared a five-step collaborative PM process during a recent MPUG webinar now available on-demand.
Change Management and Start | Evolve
My company, BrightWork, and its partners help organizations adopt and implement collaborative PM. This in turn helps organizations be successful with their objectives.
Some people find it hard to make changes because they see no need. As a result, the questions to ask are: How do you get out of a rut? How do you move? How do you change? And one of the things we say is, “Start | Evolve.”
That means try something. Just get some momentum and keep going. Aristotle put it well: “Whatever we learn to do, we learn by actually doing it…” It’s the doing that helps us change, that brings us along, that helps us evolve.
Sure, you can try telling people that they need to adopt a new process by writing it in a knowledge base article or sending an email, but we hardly ever find that to be enough. Unless you do something with the information, you tend to forget it quickly.
An awful lot of what we hear and read, like what you’re reading in this article, is common sense. And as the old adage goes, “Common sense isn’t so common.” We don’t practice what we learn, which means it never becomes a part of us or the way we work.
At one level change is hard; but at another level, when you understand how to change it’s easy. Just start.
