Project Management: What they do not teach you

Every experienced project manager would tell you that having a formal certification is just the foundation and you need to be more aware of ground reality than the text book frameworks. Of course the frameworks are useful but they are not sufficient.


Below mentioned are the top 10 things that they do not teach you in school.

1. Politics is reality and you cannot avoid it.
2. Finding right resources is the biggest challenge, not only in terms of skills but the commitment also. You would be lucky if you get a team where at least 50% members are excited to be the part of the project. Most of them would be neutral and many would be even anti-project!
3. Business cases for the project may be based on lot of invalid assumptions. Thus it becomes very difficult to realize the benefits expected and hence the team and key stakeholders lose the interest half-way.
4. You can’t take sponsors commitment to the project to be given. In many cases they are not even half-interested.
5. Cross cultural/geography teams are more common than you thought, hence the way of working and communication needs to be tailored to the situation.
6. Most of your time may get spent in non-value adding activities including redundant reports and emails that you can’t avoid.
7. You may be expected to control many stakeholders over whom you do not have any direct or indirect control. You must be ready to devise your own system/structure to get the task accomplished by them.
8. Daily and weekly meetings are essential but not everyone comes prepared and thus a lot of time is wasted.
9. Audits are essential but they may not provide you with any meaningful recommendations. Most of the time they end up either as a checklist verification or fault-finding/blame game further enhancing your troubles.
10. You will be the first scape-goat when things go wrong. Being leader of the team, you may be held accountable to things for which you are neither responsible nor have control/authority!