All Project Managers should be part of the Department Of Doing

I was reading a blog and found out about a New Zealand company called the Department of Doing. The founding partners created a Directives of Doing forming their code of conduct. Richard Hollingum set up the company because he saw that the world was full of ideas. Unfortunately, a large number of ideas do not happen, they became compromised or they do not turn out as planned. His company focuses on making them happen and generating ideas that will happen.

Many times people only define the Project Manager role around budgets, schedules and resources. While they are important, it is more important that the project deliver a usable solution aligned with the business need. When a project tends to stray from one of these measurements (admit it, they all will), instead of blindly stuffing it back onto the track, we need to use that as an opportunity to step back and take another look. This is the chance to pull the two hidden components, quality and usability, out into the light. Instead of blindly pushing to get back on schedule, on budget, or get more resources, let us ask if we are still on track to deliver a usable solution at the right level of quality.

In Jeff Pfeffer and Robert Sutton’s 1998 book, The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge Into Action, they pointed out that organizations and people can know the right thing to do but do not take the right actions to make it happen. Too many times talking about the problem or solutions are a substitute for taking right action. As a Project Manager, we see these at Lesson Learned meeting, status meetings, and project reviews.

As the Project Manager, everyone looks to us to “get it done”. Leading cross functional teams in a matrix environment, we must be vigilant. We need to make sure we are translating the ideas into a usable solution at the right level of quality. We must weed out and eradicate the tendency to substitute talk for action. At the end of the day, being able to say you were on time, within budget and did not need more resources does not win points if the deliverables do not match a strategic business need and are not usable.



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