Читать книгу The Red Pill Executive - Tony Gruebl - Страница 18

In January 2014, several large Affordable Care Act health exchanges failed. Shortly afterward, writer Kyle Dowling interviewed Dr. Harold Kerzner for a Huffington Post blog entitled, “Surviving Disasters in Project Management.”²⁸

Harold Kerzner, Ph.D., M.S., M.B.A., is Senior Executive Director with International Institute for Learning, Inc. Dr. Kerzner is globally recognized as an expert on project, program, and portfolio management, as well as total quality management. He is a strategic planning expert and the author of over 140 books on engineering and project management, some of them bestsellers.²⁹ Clearly, Dr. Kerzner is an expert. His experience in all types of endeavors have given him the title, Godfather of Project Management.

In the interview, Kyle Dowling asked Dr. Kerzner the following question: “In your opinion, why has project management been so controversial over the years in terms of its validity as a profession?”

10 Reasons for Project Management Failure from CHAOS:³⁰

 •Executive support

 •User involvement

 •Experienced project manager

 •Clear business objectives

 •Minimized scope

 •Standard software infrastructure

 •Firm basic requirements

 •Formal methodology

 •Reliable estimates

Other criteria: small milestones, proper planning, competent staff, and ownership

Dr. Kerzner replied, “My personal belief is that the resistance sits at the senior-most level of management.”

That’s Number 1 on The CHAOS Ten list: Executive Support.

Dr. Kerzner continued, “They’re afraid if they make project management a career path they will have to give the project managers authority and the right to make decisions. They’ll essentially have to empower them.”

That’s Ownership, last in the list under Number 10: Other Criteria.

He further added, “What they’re afraid of is that project managers will make decisions that should have been made at the executive level. They resist making it a career path and believe PM can be managed on a part-time basis, which doesn’t work.”

That one didn’t make The CHAOS Ten. Perhaps it is included in “Other” or perhaps it ties to Number 3 related to the experience of the project manager.

Dr. Kerzner went on, “What I’m really saying is that information is power. Those who have control of that information are hesitant about sharing it with project managers, and those who have authority do not want to share that with project managers as well. It has been the stumbling block all along.”

Furthermore, Dr. Kerzner attributes the failure of the health insurance exchanges under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act to this fundamental problem in project management. It’s almost as if he said, “Dear fellow project managers, we brought down Obama Care. I’m sorry to say.”

Is the average Operations Executive really that protective? Do they withhold information and authority from their managers to protect their own executive power… even at the expense of project success? If that’s truly the case, withholding information would certainly have significant impact on the 70% failure rate.

Did Dr. Kerzner put his finger on the problem, though? Do Operations Executives truly refuse to empower project managers? Or did Dr. Kerzner examine the symptoms perfectly, yet misdiagnose the problem?

We would say if an initiative has merit, none of these above reasons should exist long enough to derail it. Taking it one step further, the root of the issue lies hidden under Number 10: Other Criteria. Isn’t it interesting that the core problem didn’t even make The CHAOS Ten list? Instead, it’s last in the tacked-on string under Other Criteria: Ownership.