How to promote good project management

Dear Bob ...Our company has a long history of lack of knowledge about project management. Many of the stories that are legend here harken back to a time when we were 1) much smaller, 2) most of our clients didn't care about project management, and 3) for those clients who did, the stories embody late nights and weekends getting things out the door for those awful people who didn't respect how much careful though

Dear Bob ...

Our company has a long history of lack of knowledge about project management. Many of the stories that are legend here harken back to a time when we were 1) much smaller, 2) most of our clients didn't care about project management, and 3) for those clients who did, the stories embody late nights and weekends getting things out the door for those awful people who didn't respect how much careful thought our work really took.

Having just read some advice about helping cultural change by emphasizing stories that feature the values and practices you'd like staff to adopt going forward, I'm at a loss as to how to make good project management exciting. Now we do have a number of projects here in any year that are in trouble, and have had some very successful "interventions," but those interventions aren't necessarily ones the project staff would like made public - "this project was really headed down the tubes until they started paying attention to project management!"

Anyway, any advice?

- PM Promoter

Dear Night-guy ...

You make an excellent point - communicating the value by holding up someone else's bad project as a poster child is bad form.

One popular strategy is to use statistics instead of anecdotes. While anecdotes have more persuasive power, statistics have the advantage of allowing the guilty to remain anonymous. I don't know where your company is in tracking project stats, though, and I suspect that for every failed project, there's another that squeaks through to "successful" completion through a combination of heroics, ingenuity, and redefinition of what "success" means.

Another is to start with one or two volunteers who are willing to try a new way of going about things, achieve success with them, and have them testify to the value of the new techniques to everyone else. In product terms, the organization will start with the pioneers, then persuade, in order, the early adopters, mainstream, and skeptics. The last hold-outs will either hold out until natural selection does its thing, or until they retire or are fired.

I don't know how to make good project management exciting, though. The whole point of it, after all, is to prevent excitement.

- Bob