Our Mission Statement

16th January 2020

Here at this blog we think that getting project management wrong is easy and we invest a lot of effort making sure our projects stay on the right path. Recently we’ve also been spending a lot of time trying to understand why it is easy for projects to go wrong, especially when project management is supposedly such a well studied and written about topic.

The most important idea from these discussions was that projects can be complicated but that doesn’t necessarily make them hard to manage. Just because a project might have a hundred different phases does not mean it is bound to fail. We think the real issue is complexity, those unforeseen dependencies and unpredictable consequences of events that make projects hard to plan and keep on track. Complexity is a type of underlying risk in a project that can create situations where doubling a project team may slow progress, or where additional work in one department can cause another department to fall behind.

The solution seems obvious; we need to try and reduce complexity in projects. Yet actually introducing simplicity in projects is not well understood, there is no PMI PMBook® chapter on “simplification” and while the agile manifesto is better and lists as a principal “simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done”, there is no clear guide about how to achieve this.

That is why we would like to announce that from now we will use this blog to focus our ideas on how to create simplicity in projects and changing the name to projectmanagementsimplicity.com

Michael & Francisco