In the 90's the the management battle cry was "turn task to projects". With adoption of such Philosophy the productivity in most companies increased and in some instances the quality of work increased as well. Now going into 2010 Is Project Management a thing of the past?
No matter how good a project is managed there are basic flaws resulting to project delays, ever increasing cost and lack of decision making from people working on a project. Several decades onwards, the question is there a strategy better than project management where tasks are broken down to smaller and manageable projects. In my perspective, yes, there is and it has to do with turning project management to product management. The biggest flaw in project management is the hierarchy of decision making where as a project member needs to get a decision from his team lead then the team lead will need to get a decision from the project manager whereas the project manager needs to receive the decision from his programme director and finally the decision has to be taken by the company's management. This is true even in most simple issue such as purchasing a server for a particular project because the old one broke down....
How do you solve this common management problem? The answer is to optimise how each project is managed which in turn requires a new approach. Let's say what happens if we give project managers the full responsibility of a particular deliverable without and full decision making power? When you manage a project you expert results, what ever the results will be. What if we turn the task into a product and make the project manager fully responsible from concept to delivery? Will this avoid the most common problems encountered today? In my perspective yes it will. Now let's turn a project manager to a product manager give him or her full responsibility of the project much like managing a product and let's watch an amazing transformation. Of course we still need good management skills to be fully successful. The "product" is defined as the results of a particular task or deliverable.
As a product manager he or she is fully responsible from concept to delivery and also responsible for constant innovation and improvement. With this the best in a person is brought out since he or she has now the flexibility not available before, further to that completing a "product" and continuously innovating is a more rewarding task.
