Appendix C

What Practitioners and Experts Say

I asked a number of practitioners and experts from different locations, industries, and organizations who support the situational concept of project management for comments. I received interesting responses:

Project Management is not about following up the written process, it is much more diverse. It’s about adapting the provided tools and getting the best of them to have a successful management in our projects. We need to find what fits to our specific necessities.

Brenda Adame, Project Manager
Herbalife International, Guadalajara, Mexico

Every project is unique; even if the final product of the project is the same as a previous project, there are changes already because people change, technology gets updated, new threats require new security measures, etc. Project management is the common framework where each role in the project can select the applicable tools, technologies, methodologies, and experiences in order to adapt them, communicate them, and apply them to the new project so it can be managed with a common goal to achieve the best possible results at the end.

Andreas Alambritis, Project Manager
Easy-Forex, Limassol, Cyprus

How diligently a PM responds to a situation, leaving aside the standard go-by-the-book responses, not only makes the PM situationally intelligent but also makes the customer feel reassured.

Ondiappan “Ari” Arivazhagan, Chief Executive Officer
International Institute of Project Management (IIPM),
Chennai, India

When clients ask me to come in as a professional project manager and consultant to solve their problems, I often face the stretch between upper management and the project team. Upper management wants the latest and best or the company-wide used standard in project management for any project. Dealing with the team is totally different. They wish me to acknowledge what they have done so far and the way they are doing things in the team. I found that I would not be successful ignoring either of the parties. So I interpret the best practice, either company or industrial standards, and shape it to the way the team functioned before. I slowly introduce methods which seem to fit nicely, whereby being very responsive to feedback from the team. That feedback is rarely in unison. There are often some in the team who need more structure and planning than others. So that is a balancing act in itself.

Andrea Behrends, President
AB&P Project Management Training, Coaching and
Consulting, Basel, Switzerland

It is often said that context trumps character. I believe that context trumps performance as well. A project is indeed a social context. At the end of the day, it is people who complete projects, not processes, and they carry them out each time in a given situation. In fact, the best process or mix of processes in the world will not lead you to project success unless there is timely and efficient communication, transparency, drive, team collaboration, and, very importantly, clear expectations. You can of course dig for the best tools and techniques and use them as needed and for the best interest of your project; however, they’re just that: tools and techniques. You lead the show. Choose what’s best for this team, this project, and this organization.

Radhia Benalia, Training Director
CMCS Lebanon, Beirut, Lebanon

A project is not a sprint race, but a marathon: a victory in the first stage doesn’t mean anything. To win the race, “Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own” (Bruce Lee).

Vladimir Derunov, IT Project Manager
ARTEZIO Ltd, Moscow, Russia

One size doesn’t fit all.

Elisabet Duocastella Pla, Project Manager
Self-employed, Barcelona, Spain

Oscar Wilde must have been thinking of us project managers when he said that “Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative”. While we project managers strive to consistently deliver successful projects, we do so by adapting our methods, approaches, and actions to the situation at hand on a daily basis. We delegate the same task to two team members slightly differently, depending on their experience and background, while remaining fair to both. We adapt our communication to the needs of the receiving stakeholders while staying true to the core message. And we tailor our project management methodology to what fits best to the project and processes at hand. Being situational, adapting our approaches, and making sure that our actions best fit the current situation is at the core of what we project managers do. Oscar Wilde would be proud.

Cornelius Fichtner, Founder and President
pm-podcast.com, OSP International LLC,
Orange County, CA, USA

In our environment where supply-only projects styles are most frequent, the ability to use multiple techniques and methodologies comes from our diversely skilled team. This team functions on different aspects and segments of the project and allows each practitioner to use the methodology most suited for the specific environment. Since we often develop products and software for a specific deliverable, it is done within the overarching environment of an engineering project. Thus iterative approaches are used where required in development phases and structured approaches are used in the high-level project management.

Jacques Fouche, Head of Projects Department
Endress & Hauser, Johannesburg, South Africa

Is Agile the new and only truth for project management? Are old-fashioned sequential phase approaches outdated? There is no default answer to these questions. One has to look at the type of project to figure out the best approach. In our consulting we do not stick to the question of whether Agile is good or bad. Besides the project type or the line of business, we also look at the planning horizon.

Stavros Georgantzis, Managing Director, Founder and
Partner, The Project Group, Munich, Germany

Our team members are, at any time, willing to put in extraordinary efforts to reach our project goals and make our customers cheerful. It takes a deeply situational approach to keep the team members motivated for such a performance, and for me as the project manager, it is important that I know each team member very well.

Jörg Glunde, Service Consultant and Project Manager
Zeppelin Baumaschinen GmbH, Munich, Germany

There are several situational aspects in project management. I became mostly fascinated in software and IT projects by the need to respond in an Agile fashion to changing requirements and environmental conditions, which can later in the same project be replaced by a requirement for long-term forecasts and plans. There are methods and tools to respond to the various requirements, and project managers need help in identifying the right methods and tools for the different situations that they must master.

Herbert Gonder, Project Management Trainer
Self-employed, Munich, Germany

PM standards don’t work the same way for every project—sometimes it is “just get the job done; whatever it takes” and that “whatever” becomes standard for that project.

Nasim Hossain, Architect and Project Manager
Horizon Construction and Developments, Dhaka, Bangladesh

The biggest challenge in the projects that I manage are people. Developing a collaborative spirit requires empathy and adaptive selection of practices that are favorable for the specific project situations.

Nina Jaeth, Software Implementation Manager
BMW, Munich, Germany

No two situations are the same, no two projects are the same, and the skill of the project manager is in selecting the right project management approach, applying it and keeping it under review as the project develops and circumstances change.

Nick Lake, Project Director
Green Swifts, Lindfield, UK

For the non-commercial projects of Project Managers without Borders, the social and cultural environment surrounding a project can be critical to understand. Applying standard project management practices from your own culture could lead to success, or to failure, depending on how the environment is integrated with those practices. We have to develop a deep understanding of our stakeholders before we are able to help them.

Deanna Landers, Founder and President
Project Managers Without Borders, Denver, CO, USA

We work in a very dynamic environment, where we have to interact with senior management, managers on division level, and administrative staff. There were situations in my projects that required a high degree of agility, and others when I needed to develop long-term predictions.

Srinivas Maram, Project Manager
Health Canada, Ottawa, Canada

The key to success or failure of a project must be adaptability—being frozen in a rigid framework of prescribed “best practices” cannot possibly ensure successful results in project delivery. One of the projects in the social sector that I worked with had to completely change the goals and objectives from developing a disaster relief communication system to a skills development initiative due to the legal framework in the country—situational project management where the project manager takes decisions based on the current scenario is the need of the hour.

Alakananda Rao, IT and Project Management Consultant
ALVARI Systems, Kolkata, India

A project manager must adjust the approach to the business situation: The difference between external and internal project delivery has nothing to do with whether there is an external and internal project manager. However, the pressure felt by project managers can seem very different as the external projects, those projects being undertaken for an external client, are driven directly by a fixed goal from outside so that the company that you are developing the project for will get all the possible revenue from the project once it has been completed. The aim of most internal projects is to enhance or to expand the company’s business or to improve elements that exist within the company’s make-up.

Mark Reeson, Project Management Advisor, Keynote Speaker
M R Project Solutions Limited, Lowestoft, United Kingdom

You can use as many PM tools or standards as you want . . . but you will mostly not finish a project on time, on budget, and of quality if you do not have the empathy to be highly responsive to changes during the life cycle of a project. This is my way for practicing situational project management.

Boris Reichenbächer, Project Manager
Daimler AG, Stuttgart, Germany

To be very clear, every project is unique, not just because of the constraints on cost, scope, and schedule, but due to the expectations and working style of customer stakeholders. Having managed more than 30 public-facing health IT projects in the past 15 years, I find that my project management tools remain consistent and effective, while it is the stakeholders that reflect the unknown of the project. Their responsiveness, dedication, quality of feedback, and communication style will dictate the adjustments I must make to ensure a productive team and successful outcome.

Christopher Scordo, Managing Director
SSI Logic, PMTraining, Walnut, CA, USA

We cannot know with certainty the outcome or consequences of decisions made today. A project is an expedition that has few prescriptions on which to rely. Projects are expeditions that evolve successfully through their adaptation to different situations. Methodology and techniques serve project management but they do not direct it. A project regime working in partnership with a “business as usual” organization requires care. Every person is unique like every project to execute. That is the beauty of this profession.

Santiago Soria, Project Manager
Sener Ingenieria y Sistemas, Madrid, Spain

Project management is contextual. “Best practices” is a misnomer. A more appropriate phrase as used in the PMBOK^® Guide is “Generally accepted practices”.

Mukund Toro, Project Manager and Consultant
Self-employed, Bengaluru, India

I was struck by the fact that, with only one exception, all of the neutral or negative impacts of achieving styles fell in the “Direct” grouping category. In other words, if you want to reduce the risk of project failure, get all the other stakeholders involved in a partnering, contributing manner!

Roger Voight, Project Manager, Project Management Trainer
Retired, Munich, Germany

The concept of there being “one best way” to achieve something was the product of scientific management in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. This idea stifles innovation and progress. Good practice and best practice are very different concepts. One of the underpinning tenets of good practice is adaptation to current needs and continuous improvement. This concept is spelled out in the PMBOK^® Guide: “Good practice does not mean that the knowledge described should always be applied uniformly to all projects; the organization and/or the project management team is responsible for determining what is appropriate for any given project”. A good methodology incorporates agility and continuous improvement by including processes for scaling and adjusting the methodology so it is adapted to be fit for purpose on each project. One size never “fits all”!

Pat Weaver, Managing Director
Mosaic Project Services Pty Ltd, Melbourne, Australia

As the largest special interest portal for project management in the German-speaking region, projektmagazin.de has a strong focus on practitioners. When we look at the various articles that we receive and publish, and also at the discussions among our 80,000 visitors per month and 21,000 subscribers, we find that project management is a fundamentally situational discipline. Project managers must be highly adaptive in selecting approaches, behaviors, tools, and methods to their ever changing environments.

Regina Wolf-Berleb, Managing Director
Projekt Magazin – Berleb Media GmbH,
München-Taufkirchen, Germany

Project management, like any other tool set, is only as effective as its selection and application. Blind application of process where it doesn’t belong will often result in more harm than benefit.

Jonathan Woodcock, Project Manager
University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada