Getting from A to B on a straight line.   On that premise, project management sets out to map all the steps and linkages along a timeline.  But project management itself has become so involved there’s  a high priesthood of professionals certified by the PMI.

Consider that over 80% of the PMI curriculum is focused on the planning phase, with a mere one sentence referring to execution – and that, only as a dispatching function.  (Koskela  et al.: The Underlying Theory of Project Management is Obsolete, PMI 2002 ).   It is no surprise that last year saw a major overhaul within the PMI, self- confessedly to fix a growing irrelevance to day-to-day managers.

Absolutely,  the more complex the interdependencies and sequences in a situation, the more necessary it is to pre-plan.

However, as the project moves into implementation, PM’s very own complexity  collapses unto itself.  Why? Reality doesn’t follow our plans.  As the daily operations involve more and more external factors, delays, and uncertainty,  it becomes harder to maintain the convenient tidiness of the GANTT chart.  Ask a roomful of blackbelt six-sigmas how many  are able to keep the GANTT operational through the end of the project.

The GANTT  is invaluable as a planning reference point, but it isn’t going to be your daily management tool.

As decision-making moves upward in the organizational hierarchy, there’s increasing complexity.  Consider that a study of chief executives attributed failure to failed execution, and not to lack of plans or resources.   We’ll come back to this point shortly.

The primary tool for PM has always been Microsoft Project®, which has co-evolved with the PMI curriculum.  Essentially, all events and resources are planned along a timeline: that in itself is faultless.  But here lie the two main fallacies.  One, the software defines “issues” narrowly as scheduling-related .  Two: it does not have an inherent mechanism for feedback loops.

That the world, thanks to electronic media and global interconnectedness, is increasingly complex and fast-changing, is the executive’s new reality.  It is less and less about engineered certainty, and more about shorter, faster OODA loops .   A project management tool must have a built-in mechanism for enabling real-time updates and redirections;  Microsoft Project® does not.

Ironically, the MS Project® development team had to go outside of its own tool to track issues.

“ Expect the unexpected. In the course of its own work, Capossela’s team came upon the central truth of collaborative work: Most projects are derailed by unexpected problems that thwart what looked to be an on-time, on-budget operation.

As part of its own internal operations, the team often uses a homegrown database that it has dubbed Raid. Like the canned product of the same name, it is meant to help find and kill bugs — in the code — and keep them from multiplying.

When it came to working on its own project, the team appreciated the value of Raid. “Keeping our eye on those bugs — those issues — was just as important as getting something finished on time, if not more important,” says Todd Warren, who served as Project’s program manager before Capossela…” – Fara Warner, in Fast Company.

Microsoft has not been able to step back far enough to rethink its own Project® in a larger context.  Fortunately, there are other tools out there more suited to strategic implementation that also inherently allow tracking with updates and redirections.

The real problems tend to be the soft and fuzzy which are not apparent from the GANTT – and a lot of fuzzies are people-related issues.  But that’s real life, and cannot be ignored just because they do not tidily lend themselves to simple timelines of events.

Strategic planning and execution must be even more quickly adaptive as the situation spirals out to include more external factors.

Years ago, Bossidy and Charan reminded us to ask what really matters.  Your world needs a ruthless Pareto 80-20 trimming more than ever.  Your staff planners should develop comprehensive GANTT maps; but,  very quickly, for this fiscal year, what  five or seven deliverables will define your success?

In summary:

1. Project management ( as embodied by the PMI curriculum and its co-evolved tool MS Project®) painted itself into a corner of impracticality by overemphasizing planning  in itself.

2. The day-to-day management reality is that it’s a process within a complex, and ever faster changing context.

3. Managers need tools with information-and-correction  loops to track and drive what really matters.

Scheduling is not the issue, as MS Project® might want to define it:  rather, scheduling  issues are the end result of the fuzzies  - typically things outside your scope, resources, authority and tidy timelines.