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Modern Project Management - a Discipline for all Seasons?

Modern project management skills and techniques are well suited to ensuring that projects deliver the maximum value for the investment made. Change and Benefits Management are rightly considered to be essential for ensuring that the context into which projects deliver is well prepared for their arrival and that they deliver the best outcomes possible. Project management helps to make the good times better.

But these aren't the good times

Is PM a luxury?

The focus at the moment is not on maximising benefit but on minimising cost; not about growing the business but about business survival. Does this make modern project management an overhead which can be cut? Possibly.

"Old fashioned" PM

Modern project management will be viewed as a luxury which cannot be afforded if it forgets that it is built on the firm foundations of "old fashioned" project management.

• There are two sides to the value balance and whilst benefits should be the driving force behind projects, "old fashioned" attention to cost is also necessary
• Change management, with its concentration on people, remains necessary but the techniques required may be more 50s than 90s
• The need for planning and estimation has always remained even if it became less fashionable - now it is needed more than ever

Modern project management needs to remember the priorities of the organisations in which it is deployed and the traditions from which it came. If it doesn't, then it won't have the opportunity of demonstrating why its more modern aspects are important too; if it does, it will become as indispensable as Finance in these straightened times.