Project Management: The under-invested capability

The world runs on projects. Buying a house is a project. So is a wedding, a kitchen renovation and getting rid of the ants that have somehow found their way into your conservatory. 

At work, it's implementing AI tools, restructuring a department or moving to a new finance system. If it has a start, an end, a stakeholder with opinions, and an outcome that’s expected, it's a project.

Harvard Business Review estimated that by the end of 2027, project-oriented economic activity would be worth $20 trillion, with 88 million people working in project management roles. The Project Management Institute estimates that there’ll be a demand for up to 30 million more project professionals by 2035. Projects aren't a side activity, they're the mechanism through which every organisation improves. 

Yet many organisations STILL (I’ve been talking and writing about this for a while) assume that everyone already knows how to manage one.

Businesses that would never let an unqualified person near the payroll will happily hand a multi-million pound transformation to someone whose only preparation is having once organised a great Christmas party.

Project management is treated as an innate ability, like breathing or complaining about the lack of air conditioning, rather than what it actually is - a skill that requires proper training, practice, feedback and continual development.

The same applies to sponsorship. There's a persistent belief that seniority equals capability. That they'll instinctively know how to steer a project to a successful outcome. I’ve spoken to and trained hundreds of people and I can tell you, they don't. 

Sponsorship is a discipline in its own right - making timely decisions, staying visible, removing blockers and holding the project manager to account. Most senior managers have never been taught any of it. 

The results are therefore, unfortunately, predictable. Research found only around 35% of projects worldwide succeed in achieving their goals. That's a two-thirds failure rate on tens of trillions of dollars of activity. We wouldn't accept those numbers from any other business function.

The great news is that it’s fixable, through investment in the capability of the people doing the work, not another methodology rollout or a new template library.

The thing about under-investing in project capability is that you're not saving money, you're deferring improvement in outcome delivery. Every project is an opportunity to make the organisation (regardless of what you do) better than it was. 

Get the capability right and you have a repeatable engine for change. Get it wrong and you have expensive lessons, learned slowly (if at all), that are documented, filed away and never read.

Projects are how organisations evolve. Which makes project management and sponsorship not a nice-to-have, but one of the most consequential capabilities you're currently not investing in.