Innovation In Project Management

Beyond the hyperbolae, there is certainly such a thing as an innovative project. A project whose goal is something never before attempted. If successful, such a project can yield rich rewards, but they are high on risk and inevitably carry a higher likelihood of failure.

This isn’t project management innovation in the way that critical path analysis was when it was implemented. It isn’t innovative in the way that Critical Chain project management is. Was the Agile Manifesto innovative when it was written in 2001? Maybe, but if it was, that was over 20 years ago.
Taking mechanisms and approaches used elsewhere can be innovative. The innovations of the last 20 years (mobile computing for instance) have certainly enabled or facilitated a wealth of project management outcomes, but they are the innovations of others utilised and incorporated into the project management domain. They are not in themselves project management innovations.

Projects continue to fail, and mostly for the same reasons. With this born in mind, if the domain does innovate, it’s difficult to suggest that it innovates enough or in the right ways.

Is there any evidence that project management does not innovate? There certainly is if you know where to look.

The illustration below is the current published state of the art on stakeholder mapping. Both the APM and the PMI cite just such an approach in their literature. Despite it being unfit for purpose, it is a surprisingly long lived component of the project management domain.

This oft cited (and rarely, if ever, used) approach to stakeholder management is not just unusable, it is counterproductive. The reasons for this are self-evident so I won’t indulge in a tear down.

Poor stakeholder management is a factor that can impact project outcomes disproportionately. It is also consistently undernourished. The tools and mechanisms available to project managers are few, outdated and unfit for purpose.

If a charge was to be levelled at the project management domain that it doesn’t innovate it would immediately pre-empt a question of why not?

There is a risk of initiating lengthy and unproductive debate in suggesting that the overall domain of portfolio, programme and project management (P3M) may not be innovative and supposing the reasons for why this might be the case. There probably are some identifiable headwinds that deter (or at least do not encourage) innovations. Does it really matter what they are?

What could successful innovation look like?

I know what I think innovation looks like and just as importantly, what it doesn’t. You (the reader) will have a different and no less valid view on that.

Perhaps a better question is what will be the consequential benefit of innovation? To businesses? To budget holders? To the project and programme community? To Society?

Investments and those that lead them will achieve more with the same or the same with less. Projects will succeed a bit more (for the same or less overhead) and they will fail a bit less. And when they inevitably do fail, the impact of their failure will be a little less. The factors that deter project success will be diminished and the causes of project success will be amplified.

Perhaps most importantly, there will be the data to articulate all of this.

Barnaby Davies is a project and programme management professional. Omnivisto is a company with a bright vision for how portfolios and programmes can be tracked, managed and delivered.