For sharing – 10 Keys to Being a Wildly Successful Project Manager by Alec Satin’s post is a nice look into daily habits and some characteristics that make PM’s successful. One aspect that I like about Satin’s blog is his approach to the soft skills of PM because for most of the corporate world many of us work in, mastery of this area can get us a lot of mileage in projects. PMs in my view are like movie/stage directors getting other people to act in concert to achieve something. Looking at people side of things however, is difficult because it’s not very measureable and often too “vague”. Many professional PMs have backgrounds in science and engineering disciplines which are more rigorous than your average “business major”. Nevertheless, it seems that this aspect of PM is as important as the process-side and technical-side of project management. The reason, IMHO, is that people make projects happen, no amount of process or technical PM know-how ever got projects completed without people. The question might then be, do people come first or does the PM environment (i.e. PM processes and PM knowledge) come first? Is it a chicken and egg question? This seems like another version of the discussion between Jim Stroup and Ben Simonton in Star Systems blog post. Where if I were to summarize simplistically, is a discussion between a systems view of management (i.e. Drucker) vs an individual-focused view of management. (It’s thought-provoking and challenges one to seriously rethink his/her belief system of people, organizations or so-called “people systems”).

My personal take on the intersection of people and systems approach in project management is that we need a “people systems” approach to ensure a predictable set of behaviors and outcomes in project management environments. People if permitted can do wonders and releasing this potential is to me a key management responsibility to achieving organizational success. But, individuals need some direction to channel the energy in a productive and focused manner, and this is where we are back to square one – striking the balance between systems approach and an individual leadership approach (really two sides of the same coin). As an IT project manager, I would prefer more systems approach in our IT PM environments to help structure people’s activities and provide some kind of “predictability” of output/outcomes from PM activities – in other words try to “operationalize” project management work.

We have a much more focus these days on a sytems engineering approach toward PM (i.e. INCOSE), to drive quality PM for businesses. Taking a systems approach to it would make PM more disciplined, rigorous and therefore resulting in (more) successful projects. One such proponent who I know is Dr. Paul Giammalvo who on various PM sites and mailing lists have argued for this. He’s got an interesting set of opinions on Project Management and you can see some from PMFORUM. Paul A. Tedesco is another PM who takes a systems view and he wrote a book called Common Sense in Project Management. The book takes a different view on Project Management than most out there and I would recommend it highly to the serious PM practitioner.

For other high quality reads on Project Management success from the blogosphere, check out:
1. Models of PM Success from Glen B. Alleman’s Herding Cats blog, and
2. Posts on PM Success from Kailash Awati’s eight2late blog.