The Project Management Office Toolkit

Project Management and Bureaucracy

There is a feeling, particularly in smaller, more nimble companies or departments, that project management is overhead, imposing requirements that eat up valuable time that would be better spent in doing real work. While even the most devout anti-bureaucrat recognizes that some management is needed on big projects, there is a willing audience for the proposition that, on small projects, it is unwarranted.

Unfortunately, some project management methodologies do not differentiate among projects based on their size. Instead, they fuel the opposition to project management on smaller projects by dictating a full suite of deliverables for everything.

However, consider the example of the systems upgrade. I did not ...