PM ChangeAgent Commentary by Stacy Goff.
In July 2018, Project Management Review (PMR, in China) published an interview with me. The interview appeared in their online magazine, their paper magazine, and in PM World Journal. This PMR interview is about Small Projects.
An Interview
PMR: You’ve mentioned that the secret weapon of high-performing project teams is small projects. What is the logic behind this statement?
For many organizations, small projects are an invisible 20-35% of their entire annual expenses. Funding usually comes from an operations budget, and staffing is not based on prioritized portfolios. Instead, it is based on ‘who isn’t doing anything important right now?’ Most organizations don’t even have a definition of what constitutes a small project! And, they fail to apply a consistent approach for identifying, prioritizing, delivering, and evaluating their success.
I noted this in the early 1980s, as I was coaching my clients to develop portfolios of their projects. I saw, in the most-advanced organizations, an understanding that small projects needed different treatment than larger ones. For example, they often solved symptoms, rather than spending the time to understand underlying causes. Many times, the same symptoms occurred dozens of times. Eventually, someone would realize it was far too expensive to continue doing repetitive ‘quick fixes.’ Then, they would finally understand the root cause, and permanently cure the problem.