Management is a Practice, not a Culture

I have worked with various Boeing organizations over the last twenty-seven years. Not to long ago, I was working with an IT team. During that assignment, we had the good fortune to attend an internal conference on project management.

It should be noted, that there are four very different cultures between aircraft, space, military and computing. However, the views on project management practices were not very different between the cultures of old technology guard. Project and program managers on the manufacturing side agreed on basic principles. The odd team was the new technology guard of the computing folks.

Looking into the differences became a fun research project that yielded some interesting conclusions. In fact, the differences were not unique to Boeing. It turns out; there is a very curious difference between the “old” technology industries born between the end of the Civil War and the start of World War II such as the airplane industry, automobile industry, the electric industry, telephone, radio, television, etc.; and those “new” technology industries born after World War II, such as computing, software, etc.

The first group matured with the American version of “modern” management, which was born after slavery was outlawed in 1863. In this group, project managers are what I will call “real” managers. This means they are they same as any other manager, they are decision-making agents of the corporation. They are accountable for their authority, which is appropriate for their responsibility. In fact, employees who move out of an area of craft expertise and into a management role must undergo extensive programs of education and training to master the skills of management before accepting the role.

The second group was born after the end of World War II, essentially during a time when there was no competition on a global scale. With out the need to be disciplined, the effort of training managers in the principles and practices of management had totally lost its meaning. The role of the manager was transformed from a hierarchy of asset controlling decision makers to a hierarchy of skill controlling supervisors.

As a result, project managers in IT areas, unlike their counterparts from more mature industries, rarely have control of the team, budget or schedule. The result of course is some amazing statistics in terms of project failure rates.