Interview: Harvey Maylor
Project Management
SM
This is a podcast for Cranfield School of Management. I am Steve
Macaulay and I am interviewing Harvey Maylor about his book
Project Management. Now, Harvey, project management hasn’t
always got the best of names. Lots of people think about project
management in the context of failed high profile projects like
Heathrow Terminal 5 or government computer failures. Business
people seem to think of it more as a kind of back room activity with
people sweating away in a room with Gantt charts and Microsoft
Project programmes and so on – are they wrong?
HM
The work we have done over the past few years has reinforced that
your view is consistent with what a lot of people in the past have
thought about project management and its role in business. What
we have seen is that project management itself has emerged from
about the 1950s on as a recognised discipline, as a recognised
activity within business and that there is a toolset associated with it.
The work we did during the late 90s showed very clearly that
certainly Chief Execs’ perceptions of project management was that
it was just about Gantt charts and kind of what else was there?
Now the examples that you have just mentioned, that this is an
activity that is fundamental to so many organisations – it’s not just
the way they deliver value. So all the organisations that were
working on the Terminal 5 project were project based organisations.
But it’s also about the ways that organisations change and the
particular failure that you mention at Terminal 5 is very pertinent,
because that was a failure of organisational change, particularly on
the part of British Airways. So that was being run as a project as
well.
So what we have got is something here that has been perceived in
those ways. But if you just compare that with the reality of the
importance of this and getting it right, it’s totally different, its core
business and core activity for so many organisations today, that to
treat it as a low level task is entirely inappropriate now. This is a
core strategic activity.
SM
So, it’s a core activity, it’s strategic – can you give me some sense,
without stating the obvious, what project management is in your
view?
Harvey Maylor
HM
Project management is the art and science of taking a requirement
and turning it into reality. That requirement could be an IT system,
an organisational change, the development of a new product, a new
organisational strategy, a new government policy – all of these are
examples of a project that needs to be managed and really the
diversity is absolutely huge. If we see it as a low complexity level,
we would see that people every day are undertaking projects,
whether it be a move of a house, move of an office, whatever it is,
they are relatively constrained projects – through to some tasks
which are incredibly complex. So the term project management we
have seen recently covers tasks which were in duration from three
hours up to sixty years.
So, what we have seen is this proliferation of the term – almost
anything now can be called a project. We have got a term which
people want, to cover just about all of that because of the legitimacy
and toolset that it gives them. Whether or not that is entirely
appropriate is something that we need to consider very carefully.
So the definition of what actually is a project, and what isn’t, is
something that we cover extensively in the book to make sure that
people are looking to project management for the right kind of
approach that will actually add value to what they are doing, rather
than something that is just going to add another procedural or
bureaucratic layer of activity, which in the majority of cases won’t
add value.
SM
So, if we expand a bit on the book, what were you trying to do there
and what would you like to leave people with?
HM
OK, the book started out about sixteen years ago when I first
started teaching project management. Being fairly new to the
academic world I decided that I would look at the existing offerings
in the area and was shocked that the books that I was looking at
more resembled a cook book – do this and you will get this, if you
follow this rule you will get this result.
Now when I was going out and working with practitioners and
managing projects myself, it was absolutely clear that there were
many occasions where those rules just didn’t work. The world
doesn’t follow a simple set of linear principles – you have got
politics, uncertainty, all sorts of things. You have got people that
interfere with your nice plan which means that no matter how well
something is planned, very often you will have disturbances that
come in.
So, the world I was seeing was far more dynamic and far more
people-centred than the books that I was at the time having to
recommend to my students and so, there was that gap which I felt
was wrong. It became an obsession of mine for a while that –
Knowledge Interchange Podcasts
Page 2
Harvey Maylor
hang on, why haven’t we got a literature that represents the reality
much better of what project managers in the field are facing? Then,
why aren’t we able to educate, train or help people who want to
study this area to give them a better grounding to actually deal with
the complexities and the messiness of the reality that they face?
SM
Now in the book you put forward some quite useful frameworks to
help people to understand more about the complexity of this issue
and move it forward – I wonder if you can tell me a bit more about
that?
HM
OK. The core framework of the book is based around the 4 Ds
which is a development cycle which starts off with defining it.
D1 – which looks at the opening phase of a project, when you say
what is it that we are trying to do.
D2 is design it, to design the process, design the activities that we
are actually going to be doing to deliver the project.
D3, you go into the delivery phase and then
D4 is crucial and often missed by organisations, that is develop it.
So that is where we say, ok what have we learnt both in terms of
the process and in terms of the product? So what have we learnt
from doing this particular piece of technology, for instance, that we
can feed back into future projects that we undertake. So there is
that 4D cycle – that itself is just a very simple lifecycle to help
people to try to make sense of what is going on. We present other
models including the 7S model, which I have adapted for the project
environment. Again, just so that when somebody is going into what
can be a very complex environment, they can look at it and say OK,
how would I assess this, how would I try to make sense of what is
going on here? And so, the first of the S’s is the strategy, again
something that is often missed in projects – what is the strategy of
the organisation, for instance? How does what the project is doing
then fit with the strategy of the organisation? Is there a good fit, or
is there a mismatch? – that is a good way to be able to analyse or
make sense of how the project is working. Similarly with the
second S, on structures, one of the key things we often find is that
organisations put in place projects and project teams with totally
inappropriate structures for the objectives that they are trying to
achieve. So, these are the kind of things, through that 7S
framework, we can use to help people to try to make sense of why
some stuff is happening like it is, but also what they might do to
change, to improve some of the areas that they are seeing.
SM
What advice would you give to project managers? I mean, we have
talked about some of the challenges, some of the failures if you like,
but what advice would you give them in a nutshell? You have got
a whole book there full of advice, I guess, an insight?
Knowledge Interchange Podcasts
Page 3
Harvey Maylor
HM
Obviously, apart from buy it – you obviously need to buy the book,
which would be a trite comment, but we hope that it moves the
subject area on. That is a key thing. The advice to project
managers is that there are many standards and many qualifications
that they can obtain which are very basic – so the Prince 2, APMP,
PMP from the Project Management Institute – these are basic
qualifications and many project managers either have these or are
being encouraged to develop their capabilities through doing this.
That is an entirely appropriate way forward.
What we would encourage them to do is to say, OK, that is the
starting point in my development in this area. To be a professional
in this area requires that you continue that development. So, the
book was intended to help take people from that initial base onto
the next level where they can start to question and to build on some
of the existing knowledge, but also what we are looking for in the
future.
The piece of advice is get involved in developing that knowledge
base because there are so many good project managers out there,
there is so much good knowledge out there, what we need is a
more active knowledge base that doesn’t rely on the standards or
on the current certifications for success. We need more
practitioners developing new ideas, not just relying on the old ones,
but contributing to the development of this subject area. It is such
a key area. It’s getting so much attention at a corporate level at the
moment; this is the time for that to happen.
SM
Now, one of the things that it is easy to do – and I did it at the
beginning – was to say there is that failure and that failure, and so
on. If you were to look – from your experience and research – at
what is going well, it might be organisations, it might be people, I
would like you to actually spot some things where you would say “If
we could get more of this going on, then things would be a lot
better.”
HM
I think what we are seeing – if we take a failed project which is very
near to our hearts, which we have mentioned already, the Terminal
5 fiasco and the opening – let’s be clear, although that has been a
fiasco as a public relations exercise and in all sorts of ways, there
are so many good things about the construction phase that I think
we should look at it in terms of positive lessons which are shaping
the way that projects will be delivered in the future. These include:
the way that organisations handle risk; the way that they have
worked with the supply chain; the way that they have managed
collaboratively the complexity; the way that they have trialled things
in advance and some of the particular techniques that they have
used in the project management area to help them to do that.
Knowledge Interchange Podcasts
Page 4
Harvey Maylor
So I think in terms of if we were to focus on the failures, and clearly
there are some lessons to learn, particularly about the way that we
handle people in systems, there are some great lessons to learn
even from some of those projects which may be considered failed.
I think in the future we will see Terminal 5 as a major success. By
the way, the fact that it was actually opened on time, on budget, is a
major achievement in itself for a four and a half billion pound
project.
But there is an enormous amount to learn. I think as we go
forward, what we will need to do is to take some of those lessons
and add into those the way that we actually manage organisational
change, because treating projects and treating systems of change
as mechanical systems clearly doesn’t work. What we need to do
is to be able to look at and take the project line to the next level and
be able to say when we put people in those systems, how do they
react? How do they behave? And that is an absolutely key area
for us to develop.
SM
So, if we were to project ahead ten years and things were to work
out in the way that lessons are learnt, things develop, how would
you see projects being managed differently and more successfully
than today?
HM
Well, it is my hope through the work that we are doing in the
International Centre for Programme Management, which is our new
venture here at Cranfield, that we would have far less issues at the
project level that were caused by decisions made or avoided at a
more senior level in the organisation. So one thing that we often
see is that project managers, for instance, are given tasks or
projects which are totally unreasonable with the resources and
timescales available. So we would like to see that stop. We can
see now that there are mechanisms within the portfolio
management area to try and help us to stop that happening.
I would much rather that we saw the opportunity for more flexibility
within projects. At the moment we have toolsets that are based on
assumptions about certainty and most of the toolsets in the project
area assume that there aren’t going to be changes. That is entirely
inconsistent with reality. So, I would like to see the toolsets
change to reflect the reality of the situations. I think also, what we
call projects will be tightened up considerably. We have seen a
phenomenon called projectification over the last ten to fifteen years
where pretty much, as I said earlier, anything can be called a
project. What we want to see in the future is that a project
becomes something where it is a recognised entity – it’s not just
anything. So one of the things we are seeking to do, and we are
confident that we will make some inroads into this, is seethat there
Knowledge Interchange Podcasts
Page 5
Harvey Maylor
is clarity brought to some of the terminology. That is absolutely
vital because as the profession of project management moves on –
and it is a profession today – there is a requirement that we see
what is going to work and where, and that testing that clarity and
that sense of purpose, that we brought by getting some of the
strategic issues right, those are the things that I would hope would
be part of a vision for ten years’ times.
SM
So, finally, if you were to leave a message with two groups of
people – the professional project manager and secondly the top
leaders of a company – what messages would you like to leave with
those people about project management?
HM
OK – for the professional project manager, the message is very
simple. This is a profession, like any profession it needs to
develop and it needs to develop based on evidence – the medical
profession, legal profession and many others have had to go down
this route and that is absolutely where we need to go. We would
hope that there will be many professionals working with us to
develop that evidence for the future. So, we are looking for
evidence-based practices in that area – not many of the
prescriptions and ill-founded ideas that have been used in the past.
So in a nutshell, we need to critique, to develop and to move on
with getting evidence about what works for particular situations to
assist those project managers, and they need to be part of that
process.
For the Chief Execs and senior managers of organisations, I think
what we have seen so far is a reluctance to engage with this vital
process. Where we have managed to get that engagement, many
Chief Execs are often amazed at the problems they see, which the
boards of organisations cause, to delivery. So there is an
engagement there. There is a recognition and that recognition
needs to go beyond just simply we are going to go for tick box
training – we will simply get people qualified to this. There is a
recognition that if an organisation wants to get benefit from this then
it can do, and that having a core capability in project management
is part of a world class organisation. So those really are the key
messages – get engaged, really develop this area and project
management can be a core capability, will be a core capability that
will help to make your organisation world class.
SM
Harvey Maylor, thank you very much – you have given a very useful
map of some challenges and opportunities ahead.
Knowledge Interchange Podcasts
Page 6
Cranfield School of Management
Produced by the Learning Services Team
Cranfield School of Management
© Cranfield University 2008