The PMO World Takeover

I think it was the summer of 2001 when I first stumbled across the modern concept of Project Management.

Until then, a "Project Manager" in my department was a person who acted more or less in the capacity of lead developer for a new product. It seemed like a good title at the time. Seeing as I work in educational publishing, the job credentials included a background in some branch of education, good writing and editing skills, and experience in the industry. If you were good with people and could balance a checkbook, you could be a very good Project Manager without having ever set foot in a single business administration course.

But that summer I started working with our software development group for a special project. I took on a new role -- "subject matter expert" -- and became aware of the initials PMP for the very first time.

It's all been downhill from there.

Risk analysis, the project life cycle, work breakdown structures ... it all seemed rather esoteric, this philosophy about how we work. It was similar to metacognition, but for work instead of learning. It fit into my Franklin planner/productivity obsession. It was an interesting thing to think about, when I had the time. But I didn't have much time. I had work to get done.

That is, until the PMO arrived. And the software development guys (and gals) started referring to us, the creatives, as "the business."

The business? Now there's a revolution in thought. We're teachers, writers, academics ... liberal arts majors. We all poked fun at the business majors in college. We tolerated their existence because we knew we needed them to sell the products that we created, so that we could keep pursuing our own love and create new products for them to sell. They were a necessary evil, those business majors, and we were the creative geniuses. Now we're "the business"? Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore.

My husband and at least half the people I know in both my work and private life are in IT, engineering, construction, or other industries that have been exposed to the principles of project management for some time. Because I don't want to negate their opinion that project management works, and maybe even because I was given a glimpse of project management before it was shoved down my throat, I've tried to approach this philosophy with an open mind.

But first contact has been difficult. I and my colleagues have had some basic training, and we're now required to conduct risk analyses, wrestle with MS Project to create baselined and resource-loaded project plans, or otherwise document all the different phases of the project life cycle. Keep in mind that none of us have ever taken a single business course in our lives and have no experience or training to build on. It's like speaking a foreign language.

So I've managed to figure out that my backup plans are now "mitigating strategies" and my regularly-scheduled project check-ups are now "project control events." My problem is that I had to figure this out in the first place. No one told me. Here I thought I had all this work to do in implementing a new philosophy, when in reality I already did a big chunk of it under a different vocabulary. It's a big relief, really, but it's also a huge lightbulb moment that many other liberal-artsy people like me haven't managed to find yet.

I think there's a lot we could learn from project management, but I also think that project management has a lot to learn from us. After all, we've created some pretty successful products -- products that have taken more than five years to develop, research, and publish -- without having even heard of a PMO before. Maybe, just maybe, we've been doing a few things right? So if PMOs are going to continue their spread through Corporate America, they're going to have to evolve to fit the rest of us. For instance, how exactly do you resource-load a muse?

The mother of all ironies is that I just won a copy of The Complete Project Management Office Handbook from a podcast that I listen to on occasion, creatively named The Project Management Podcast. Maybe in there I'll find that someone has already done this work for me, and created a way of practicing project management for non-businessy minds like mine.