Recently, I’ve been tweeting about trying to put together a ‘crash course’ on project management. I’m seeing and hearing about a lot of people who are being asked to take over project management tasks and roles to try and cut costs. Not surprisingly, I think this is a false economy by any business (I would say that, I’m a project manager…) but figured if you’ve been put in that position, you just want to try and do your best to make it work. You want to get hold of the tools and techniques that can help you deliver the project successfully. Hence the crash course.

But this post isn’t about that course – I’m still trying to polish that, and decide what to do with it when it is finished! (And I’ll make sure to let you all know too.)

No, this is about what else I started thinking about while putting that course together. You see, the crash course is focused on the tools and techniques we use as project managers, what we use to get our job done. But it occurred to me that by just showing these, I was giving people a false understanding of what project management is, and how to do it well.

I’ve been guilty of this on this blog as well. I’ve been writing it to try and help new project managers, and to help myself refresh and retain the project management knowledge I have. But again, I have only been displaying the tools, not the whole picture.

Of course, it’s easy to understand why I have been doing this – the tools are pretty simple to teach. Oh sure, they may be complicated to use, it may take a lot of information to show how, but it’s a simple process – you are just moving information from one brain to another.

But that’s missing the most important part of what project managers need to have – they need to have an understanding of the concepts behind these tools.

Put it this way – it is easy to describe a hammer. You can talk about the handle, the head, the materials it is made of. You can describe the process of using it, how you place a nail, strike it to drive it into a material. All of this you can do in great detail, with great precision and accuracy.

But if you don’t explain the reason you’d want to hammer a nail, the person you are teaching knows how to use a tool, but not why. They are capable of doing a task (putting a nail into a wall) but not of understanding why it is useful (to hang a picture). Knowing why you are doing the tasks allows you to make better judgements – suddenly you know to position the nail so the picture gets good light, and so on. The concept informs the task.

And that’s what I want to get to. By only teaching the tools, I run the risk of creating project management automata – able to carry out the tasks, but with no understanding of why they are carried out. In other words, the very paint by numbers type of project manager I talked about the other week.

I suspect that gaining an understanding of the concepts behind project management goes hand in hand with the changing perception over time of what a project manager is, as set out by Cinda Voegtli at Project Connections in Evolution of a Project Manager (hat tip at Raven Young).

So, that means I need to try to teach the concepts behind project management too. That’s a bit scary. Concepts are hard to teach. Learning them, really learning them, takes effort, experience, reflection, and a whole load of coaching. And even that isn’t guaranteed to work – concepts require understanding, and understanding can’t be given, it can only be gained.

Not that that is any reason not to try, of course. So over the next week or so I’m going to be knocking around a few ideas about what the key concepts are over on Twitter (you can follow along too), then I’m actually going to try to explain them.

Wish me luck…