Battery Project Managers
As an independent Project/Programme Management consultant who works with some of the largest corporates in the world I get to see the current acceptable practices in operation. An alarming trend I have spotted for some time is the rise of the “Battery Project Manager”.
The Battery project Managers sit in clusters with other Battery Project Mangers and manage their project from afar as an academic exercise. There I no interaction with the business and no understanding of what the actual project is trying to achieve.
Its all about the process
They follow process without regard to what it is they are doing. They use so called “enterprise tools” to report up and enact the latest edict without challenge.
Issues and risks go into logs and are tracked mechanically and updated when requested. Status reports are completed on time as dictated by the PMO (The Programme Management Office).
There is no real distinction between a PMO analysts and a Battery Project Manager, in its worst manifestation Project Managers are subordinate to the analyst.
As you can tell from the article I am not overly impressed with what I see with this trend. Project management is a people game and requires interactions with others to be successful.
Its people that make projects a success not the process. Anyone can blindly follow a process but the real magic happens when you start questioning why things are done in a certain way.
Project Failures?
I am convinced that this trend is the reason why we see examples in the news of “glitches” with Bank systems or mobile phone systems not been available for hours. People who bear the scars of projects over the years know where the pitfalls are and where to look for likely problems.
If you haven’t been at the coalface it’s difficult to see what may happen.
I personally believe that the Project Management profession is at a crossroads between the entrepreneurial (free range) Project Managers and the Battery Project Managers.
I know if it was my business what I would want is to have project managers who focused on the content and not the process.
When IT is a service function
I’ve been very quiet for the last year as I have been working at 3 different clients who were all undertaking significant pieces of work in the heavily regulated utility sector. One was vertical and the other two were in the water sector.
One thing that these organisations all have in common is that they view the provision of delivery of IT as a service function and as a result, they all have “Strategic Partnerships” with external firms mainly based offshore. Unlike other sectors who seem to keep some functions in-house, these have gone the whole hog and handed it all over.
Service Function or intellectual Property
Whilst this has a very good effect on the bottom line, in terms of costs, and understanding what you will need to spend on your IT, it does leave you exposed in terms of intellectual property. The whole logic behind partnering is for the provider to offer the commodity skills that the organisation deems as not a core competency. This may have been a good approach in the past but now that IT is so fundamental to an organisation it is now actually intellectual property.
One of the major side effects of this “promotion” of IT to be central to the business is that if you come to try and change your “partner” it becomes a very high risk and fraught with danger which could, in fact, lead to business damage both financially and reputationally.
I have worked in organisations that have been crippled by this type of transition and it has taken months for them to get anywhere near to business as usual.
Another observation I can make is that without the level of investment in IT you can become very old fashioned and behind your competitors very quickly. This would help explain the amount of “disruption” that many traditional industries are encountering in recent years.
I am convinced that there needs to be a complete mindset change within senior IT management roles to ensure that they become thought and business leaders and not seen as a subordinate service provider.
The interesting Paradox is that a lot of the “Strategic” partnership organisations should be the ones that take the lead and help the legacy organisation change and drive IT forward, however, this potentially means cannibalising their current revenue streams they receive from supporting the old way.
I have been in the industry now for over 30 years and am still excited about what IT (Technology) can do for businesses. In the 80’s and 90’s we radicalised things with ERP systems. In the 2000’s it was the rise of the Internet. In the 20-teens it’s been the rise of the App and big data. If the old way of thinking maintains then a lot of the organisation that exist today will not be around in the next decade due to looking at technology as a service function.