Project management a job commodity?

As I've mentioned in a previous blog, there's this sentiment that IT and the work involved with building and maintaining it is becoming a growing commodity. Its not a view that I'm in complete disagreement with, since the very nature of IT is to streamline and automate many of the repetitive business tasks that need to get done, and paradoxically, if IT is managed properly, then it stands to reason that the work you just did to build the infrastructure would make the very job you have obsolete!

But the reality is that IT is still hard, and though there have been much improvements in terms of tools, skills and management of IT related tasks, there is still currently a high demand for high quality IT related skills sets. A Network World article lists the top 8 IT jobs for 2008:

1. Programming/application development
2. Project management
3. Help desk/technical support
4. Security
5. Data centers
6. Business knowledge
7. Networking
8. Telecommunications

As the article states, "as the U.S. economy wrestles with a weak housing market and record oil prices, demand for IT workers is on the rise". Go to any job board, and you will still see many listings for the kinds of jobs listed above and practically all paying competitive rates much higher than the average. This is especially the case for metropolitan areas such as LA. This is especially relevant and promising to me, since I make a living as a project manager for a health care company.

And its usually the case that a person who spent an earlier career in a highly technical field will usually move up into a management type position and that position will almost always be as a project manager. This is because to manage the kinds of projects that person used to work in, its usually best if she or he had hands-on knowledge of the technical work and showed some leadership abilities. In addition, many technical people will move into project management because there's this assumption that such a position is less likely to be outsourced, since the main factors in success in project management are good communication and people skills. These are the kinds of skills typically not thought of as being easily outsourced.

But this interesting blog by Terry Doerscher, who is the Chief Solutions Architect for Planview, a leader and major player in the EPM market space, concludes that project management is now a commodity skill set:

Gartner isn't saying that PM is going the way of the Dodo Bird as a discipline or skill set; to the contrary, they are saying it has/will essentially become commoditized as a common element of the general management repertoire — think more along the lines of gulls and starlings. I have to agree on that point.

Ten years ago — even five for many, project management was still a capability that most IT departments were struggling to formalize and develop. For the majority of the larger shops these days, not only is basic PM capability in place and mature, it is almost ubiquitous. Competency in project management fundamentals has become pretty much a prerequisite for hiring anyone at or above team lead. The PMBOK has replaced Catcher in the Rye on freshman reading lists and a PMP certification is as common as an iPhone at Starbucks. (Before we go on, let me point out that this shouldn't be construed as some kind of a derisive shot at PMI — it is more of a testament to the level of growth and acceptance they have attained over the years.)

While there is merit to his argument, only in that project management has become more visible and important especially in the IT industry, I hardly think the skill set is a commodity. When I think of a commodity, I usually think of something that's mass produced and cheap, because the process used to create or manufacture the good, product or service is highly predictable and repetitive. But like the PMBOK states, a project is a temporary endeavor typically engaged by a company or business to create a whole new product or service to gain a competitive edge, acquire market share quick, or in response to a competitor's hot new product. Because of competitive pressures and the fast paced, global economy, project are hardly done in a commodity like manner, and this is especially true of project done in IT. As this article from the Economist captures:

Big projects today are as likely to be built on software as they are on steel. But IT projects are no better at meeting budgets and deadlines. A £6 billion project to put the medical records of 50m Britons online by the end of this year is way over budget and has already been postponed by several months. In March, the FBI finally abandoned a $170m internal IT project, two years after problems with it had first surfaced. The Standish Group, a research firm which produces an influential annual evaluation of IT projects, judged that in 2004 only 29% of such projects “succeeded”, down from 34% in 2002. Cost over-runs averaged 56% of original budgets, and projects on average took 84% more time than originally scheduled.

While I think much progress will be made toward refining and formalizing the discipline of project management, I don't think it is a skill set that can or every will be labeled as a "commodity", but will rather become or should become a core competency of any company. The Economist article summarizes this well:

Some companies have gone so far as to become more like project co-ordinators than producers of goods or services. The “business-as-usual” bits of their operations have been outsourced, leaving them free to design and orchestrate new ideas. Nike, for instance, does not make shoes any more; it manages footwear projects. Coca-Cola, which hands most of the bottling and marketing of its drinks to others, is little more than a collection of projects, run by people it calls “orchestrators”. Germany's BMW treats each new car “platform”, which is the basis of new vehicle ranges, as a separate project. Meanwhile Capital One, a fast-growing American financial-services group, has a special team to handle its M&A “projects”. For all these firms, project management has become an important competitive tool. Some of them call it a core competence.

When a company reaches a maturity level with project management such as this, then IT becomes a not just another cost center, but rather a true enterprise wide strategic initiative.