One of the most debilitating problems in project management is when people get bogged down in time-wasting dysfunctional requirements. This can include bad processes and policies, complicated tools, super hierarchical company policies, or anything else that takes away your overall productivity. While governance, support, and equipment are necessary in the long run, project management becomes a problem when it becomes an obsession with the project. In every project, mistakes will be made and project managers must make room for them. The worst thing to do is to let something unimportant become a project in itself.
At the beginning of a project, some mistakes have no consequence on the final result. Obsessing over them simply drives people away from their work. Here I would like to explain a family story of how one of the biggest mistakes today, a poorly printed birth certificate, made little difference to an Eskimo in the early states of Alaska, and still survived.
When Alaska first became a state, my father was born in an Inuit village hundreds of miles from anywhere. It was so distant that I’m sure some people didn’t even know they were part of the United States. So new to government documentation, the villagers weren’t sure how to fill out my father’s birth certificate. They left the address and zip code blank (because none existed), and even put a check mark in the box marked “female.” The certificate issue number was something like “000000004”.
In an Alaskan January, when survival depends on staying warm and foraging for food, a birth certificate was the last thing anyone was going to spend time on.
In terms of project management, I think it’s safe to say that most people neglect certain parts of their work. Happens all the time. As big jobs are prioritized, sometimes small jobs need to be eliminated. Rather than viewing an unfinished task as a problem, a project manager should view it in light of successful project tasks. Only then can there be an accurate understanding of what is actually being accomplished in a project. Even if a mistake will be a problem in the future, sometimes nothing can be done until later.
This is not to say that people are free to neglect anything they do not consider applicable; But they should not obsess over irrelevant deficiencies.
New projects are sometimes like this Alaskan city, distant and without the structure or amenities that the project manager is used to. For one of those projects to be successful, the project manager must know how to survive in a different environment, putting the trivial things aside. Where my father lived, there were no roads outside the city. Survival had to do with local geography. To travel to other places, the locals had to bring kayaks, dog sleds or snowshoes. Knowing how to navigate on land wasn’t as simple as staying on the right side of the road, keeping the speed limit, and stopping at red lights. The Eskimos there knew how to survive, and when things came up that seemed like a waste of time, they didn’t care about them. In project management, resources, funding, and software may not always be available, and the team must ignore certain things to successfully complete a project. I am not suggesting in any way that laws and policies should be violated, and I am not saying that important accountability measures should be neglected. I’m just providing a metaphor for how one job should be prioritized over another job in project management. If the obsession with projects takes over, nothing is done.
