January 14, 2010
Why don't we teach project management to school kids?
Over my twenty plus year professional career I've spent thousands of hours performing project management duties, teaching others the discipline of project management, or studying, reading and writing about project management to become a better practitioner.
In some ways I have innate characteristics that are well suited for the profession of project manager. I have a slightly compulsive proclivity to obsess about details - I am definitely the kind of person that sweats the small stuff. While my wife will attest that this trait might be a little overbearing at times, you definitely do NOT want to hire a project manager that does not pay attention to the details. Additionally, I'm an over-communicator - about objectives, about status, about risks that may come or are realized, and about variance (schedule and cost). To some people that can be very frustrating, but in project management - and to me - communication flow is everything.
However, recently I have been thinking that I really only started my formal project management studies a little over 10 years ago. Nothing formal in graduate school, college, secondary school or younger. In essence, while I had the aptitude and disposition for a good project management, I had professional training to fulfill that role for less than half of my professional career.
Studies show that the majority of projects of any type (construction, information technology, business, even personal) fail. Failure can be total - the project does not yield the intended consequences - or it can be partial, in that certain objectives were met, but perhaps costs or schedule overran, or quality objectives were not met. In any case, there is strong evidence in the analyst marketplace that suggests - all things being equal - that project management helps mitigate the risk of project failure across a broad spectrum of industries and endeavors.
So why don't we teach our kids how to project manage? The basic principles of project management aren't particularly difficult - in fact, far less complex than algebra or geometry or grammar or even spelling. Project management is accessible to children because it allows people to organize themselves with shared rules of play in the same manner children already know how to do when they play games.
I have noticed that my kids were put into groups as early as kindergarten and asked to create a unique deliverable (art project, written assignment, a group ‘game', etc) within a defined timeframe (portion of class, time over multiple classes, homework assignments over a period of time) with multiple resources (fellow classmates, and sometimes, us parents or even community members) taking on tasks. While they haven't learned the tools of project management, they generally seem to start out with a natural tendency to read the instructions, to divvy up who is doing what, and to talk about how they are doing along the way.
In my opinion, at exactly the same time a child begins working on any collaborative task over time, they are ready to be taught the beginning principles of project management.
Will the public school system even contemplate such a notion as incorporating project management training on an ongoing basis throughout K-12 education? I sincerely doubt it. Will this writer personally try to find a way to teach his kids a little something about project management? In 2010, I'm putting it out there that I am going to try.
For instance, I really feel I could sit down with my 7 year old and explain to her the reasons why she can use risk management in so many contexts in her school and home projects. Also, I bet she'd understand the importance of a communication plan to make sure everyone on a team knows who should receive what information and when. And I have a funny feeling that she would also understand why it is such a good idea to try to think through the sequence of tasks on a project - who's doing what, and what has to come before the next thing (predecessors) - all before even getting started. I bet she might even appreciate estimating how long things would take and how much effort would have to go into it.
I may sound like I'm teetering on the brink of a harebrained idea, but I honestly think we should be doing more to help our kids learn fundamental skills to collaborate to achieve common goals using finite resources that can not be wasted. And what is a more portable, repeatable, and straightforward skill set to learn really well at an early age than project management?
Posted at 11:15 pm by Joseph Bachana
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Thank you for your post, Susan, and for the link to your website.
I'll have to agree with Sal that no one is diminishing the good work of teachers in helping our kids learn problem solving and organizational skills. However, I don't agree that learning these -- while critical -- is the same thing as learning the disciplines of project management. Further, I disagree that project management is too complicated or irrelevant for even the youngest of schoolchildren.
Consider the project management discipline of risk management. Most first graders can tell you the risks inherent in walking across the street against a red light, or the risk of jumping off a too-high ledge. I find that taking that into the classroom could be productive if they were actually taught a simple way to identify risks together in a group in advance of a class project. We're not talking anything more than a 5-10 minute discussion that includes cause, risk, effect, impact, probability, and mitigation/elimination ideas.
Consider the very act of creating a project plan. Kids in k-5 probably are too young to interact with MS project. However, having them actually sit down and first plan out the tasks needed to complete a group assignment, then apportioning out the work effort to different team members and estimating how much time different tasks will take is certainly not too complicated for the average school child. The key to success is a repeatable process that is derivative of PMBOK or PRINCE or whatever project management body of knowledge you're starting from.
If you take other project management disciplines like communication plan management, procurement management, even earned value analysis -- school kids can learn simplified versions of these. The result is that they would have invaluable skills to help them get through the rigors of secondary school and University education, as well as have a firm grasp of the fundamentals of project management at their fingertips for their future careers.
Saying that project management can't be taught is like saying teaching science to a young kid is pointless since somehow people are predestined to be physicians. Or that teaching a child how to play piano is pointless since only a select few can become experienced enough to become performing artists. And so on with any profession.
The whole point of teaching the fundamentals of project management does not mean that kids will be coming out of school with the expertise or even the intellect to become professional project managers in the same way that they would not become professionals in other areas. True, some people are born with or develop the natural aptitudes of great communication skills or great attention to details, abilities to make sure things get done on time, and so on. Of course, some people are also born with the natural leadership abilities to 'command' on projects.
However, I can assure you, there are many, many people calling themselves project managers with those personal characteristics and 'experience' that never had the formal training needed for the profession of project management, and the problems found on the projects they manage can be just as severe if not moreso than those of people with tremendous training but the wrong characteristics.
Like any profession, PM is not ONLY about experience but it is fundamentally about education and training. That is why PMI has a learning component (with assessment in the form of the PMP exam) as well as a minimum number of practical experience hours (it used to be 4,500 hours to qualify for taking the test, I don't know what it is up to now) before you can qualify. There are other tests offered for more junior PM roles (CAPM, for instance) and more advanced certifications for more senior PMs.
From a standpoint of early education, I'm not talking about getting them in-depth training in the PMBOK in my blog post. What I'm suggesting is that the average grade school kid can understand fundamental disciplines of project management if presented to them at their grade level. And, over time, those educational experiences can get richer as their brains mature and their understanding of how things work deepens.
So your point that you can never teach project management to anyone of any age, I strenuously disagree. What I will agree to is that being a competent and even talented project manager depends not only upon the individual's training and personal characteristics, but also upon their professional experiences in the field of project management.