Reinventing Project Management: The Diamond Approach to Successful Growth and Innovation Book

Reinventing Project Management: The Diamond Approach to Successful Growth & Innovation
Aaron J. Shenhar and Dov Dvir
Harvard Business School Press

Shenhar and Dvir introduce and then develop what they characterize as "a new approach and a new formal model to help managers understand what project management is all about. This new approach is based on a success-focused, flexible, and adaptive framework. We call it the 'adaptive project management approach [APM],' and it differs from [and is preferable to] the tradition approach in several significant ways" that are identified in the first chapter. Rather than replacing the traditional approach, APM builds on it by taking into full account the strategic as well as tactical aspects of project performance in both the short and the long term as well as taking into account, also, the points of view of various project stakeholders, including customers.

"To address differences among projects, we present a diamond-shaped framework to help managers distinguish among projects according to four dimensions: novelty, technology, complexity, and pace (NTCP)." By invoking the metaphor of a baseball diamond, Shenhar and Dvir correctly suggest an essential paradox of project management that I have personally observed for many years: projects are conducted within fixed parameters according to established rules and yet projects are usually messy and their results seldom predictable. Hence the importance of having a generous "owner" or benefactor and a capable "manager" as well as talented and skilled "players" who work effectively as a "team." Adjustments are inevitable and encounter resistance, if not hostility.

Whether or not the "Diamond Approach" (NTCP) is the best approach to take is, of course, for each reader to determine. My own rather extensive prior experience with all manner of projects and their teams clearly indicates that the given approach (whatever it is) must be comprehensive, cohesive, flexible, consistent, and cost-effective. Moreover, each project team must have a strong leader. That said, all project management teams and those who lead them would be well-advised to remember what Peter Drucker observed in 1963: "There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all."