The big interview - Darren Dalcher

In APM’s 50th year, Andrew Saunders meets the professor of project management to look back at how the profession has changed since the 1970s. He finds an intellectual fascination with the project successes and failures of the past – and an enthusiasm for the possibility of a more liberated, strategic profession of the future.

Few people have studied project management as closely or for as long as Darren Dalcher, professor of strategic project management at Lancaster University Business School, director of the National Centre for Project Management and one of the editors behind the seventh edition of APM’s Body of Knowledge.

In a career spanning more than 25 years, Professor Dalcher has become a respected voice for innovation in the project profession, thanks to his fascination with the power of projects and, in particular, why some fail and others succeed.

“I have been collecting stories of failure for years, and the collection is still growing,” he says with a smile. “Projects are these strange creatures with the power to surprise, excite and make a difference. My journey started with trying to make sense of these animals, to really understand what success and failure mean.”

Dalcher also has a wide‑ranging intellectual curiosity and a penchant for tackling big questions that might traditionally have been regarded as above the pay grade – and outside the skill set – of the project manager. “Projects have a meaning beyond the actual delivery,” he says. “What is our purpose and what are we trying to achieve? It’s not just to get to the end of the project on time and on budget, but to think about our responsibility to deliver something with real legacy value. Sometimes, you have to ask: ‘Is this project the best way of achieving that value?’”

So instead of the classic focus on budget, scope and timescale, Dalcher is on a mission to liberate project management so that it plays a much bigger and more strategic role – something that the experience of the pandemic has really brought to the fore. “If you think about the iron triangle, well, in an emergency situation, some of those dimensions collapse on you,” he says. “In the pandemic, we had to respond quickly and hit the ground running, because the rules were changing daily, and we had to cope with new realities. I’ve interviewed the project managers who built the hospital in Wuhan in 10 days – they didn’t have the time or the certainty to plan for everything. They had to be pragmatic and make things happen.”

Nor could a conventional approach have resulted in successes like the UK’s Covid‑19 vaccination programme, with a staggering 136 million doses administered in little more than a year. The lessons learned can have a potentially huge impact on the future of the profession, he adds. “We have to rediscover a lot of what we’ve forgotten in the last 70 years. We’ve become very risk averse – in the effort to instil governance and remove risk, we’ve lost a lot of what we had. There’s a lot of scrutiny, so we opt for safety and governance structures to protect our backs.”

A leading professor of project management urging project professionals to live a little more dangerously might raise a few eyebrows, but innovation relies on judicious experimentation, he says, and so limiting the risk in a project too much also severely curtails the potential reward. “Along the way, we have lost some of our appetite for risk. During the pandemic, project managers were given quite a lot of leeway. Some of that safety blanket was removed – project managers became more pragmatic and said: ‘If you want this tomorrow, give me the money and let me make some decisions.’”

So, it’s important to recognise, says Dalcher, that all but the very simplest projects have an inherent degree of uncertainty that no amount of planning can – or should even try to – eliminate. But that’s not to say that discipline and rigour don’t still have a role to play in his world view, rather that it’s a question of understanding the context and striking the right balance. “What I’ve discovered over the years is that too many important decisions are made too early before the problem is properly understood. The CEO or the minister makes a decision and suddenly a lot of potential avenues for experimentation are closed. But if you try to solve a problem before you really understand what it is, inevitably you’re going to miss an opportunity.”

The trend for agile project management has arisen partly as a way of trying to address these problems, he says. Agile does allow for more experimentation and course‑correcting over the duration of a project, he adds, but it is not a magic bullet to eliminate failure. “Agile was very exciting in IT about 20 years ago, but now that industry has moved on. Project managers have embraced agility just as others have ditched it. I am seeing quite a few agile failures, where organisations have bought into agile believing that it is going to solve all their problems, but forgetting that you still need to coordinate and think about the big picture.”

Personally, Dalcher is nothing if not industrious, but he is also an open and enthusiastic communicator with an engaging sense of fun. He attributes his lifelong fascination with projects to a natural intellectual curiosity plus a formative experience as a young software engineer when he was working on two very different projects. One had a clear scope and a tight schedule and was delivered exactly on time and within budget. “It was a great project by all the criteria we had, and everyone was very happy with it. But nobody used it,” he explains.

The other was much less well defined and directed, so the project team had to go direct to the users to ask them what they actually wanted. The resulting delays meant the project was late and somewhat over budget – a failure, in other words. “But the users loved it – 16 years later they were still using it. I was sitting there thinking that there was something wrong here.” Decades later, he remains a firm believer in the primacy of people when it comes to project success or failure. “Projects generally don’t fail because of methodology or because a recipe hasn’t been followed. They fail because of people – because of irrational decisions and because we don’t understand the problems we are trying to solve or all the choices that we have.”

He doesn’t believe that there is such a thing as a recipe for project success, a view that led – somewhat to his surprise – to his involvement in co‑editing the seventh edition of the APM Body of Knowledge. “I have criticised bodies of knowledge previously for almost forcing the profession to act in a certain way, for giving us a recipe. So, I was quite surprised when APM asked: ‘Will you be part of the effort to rewrite this?’”

It turned out to be a golden opportunity, he says: “Project management is changing and becoming more strategic; it’s not about the ‘how’, but asking why we are doing these things. Now the first chapter of the Body of Knowledge is aimed at senior decision‑makers, explaining what they can achieve through projects and that we need to recognise that projects are about beneficial change. They are an investment that organisations make, and we have to think about what that investment is going to deliver.”

He is optimistic that, over the past couple of years, eyes have been opened in the nation’s boardrooms and government departments as to what projects can do. Now it’s down to project professionals to make sure they stay involved in the strategic debate. “The pandemic proved that as a society we can pivot on a pinhead – life as we know it changed completely. So, I think there is a real opportunity to reshape things through projects, but the big decisions have to be made very carefully and we have to be part of the conversation. We need to be part of discussing and understanding the problem, not just the execution people.”

But he’s not going to stop adding to that ever‑growing collection of project failures any time soon, because if there is one thing that decades of study have taught him, it’s not to fear failure – or at any rate, not too much. “I love learning, so I have learned to appreciate failures from all over the world. Failure can be your friend rather than your enemy; it’s an essential part of learning and growing up, and can be the start of something really good.”

It also has the power to make life as a project manager a lot more interesting, he concludes. “We don’t enjoy doing puzzles because they are simple, but because we can’t quite work out how the components fit together. It’s that whole interaction with a difficult non‑routine situation that makes it a bit different and a bit more exciting. Project management provides a framework for exploring those parameters.”

Professor Darren Dalcher’s five future project management superpowers

1. We are people, we work with people, and so emphasising people is absolutely essential. Failures happen when people come in and mess up your perfect plans.
2. People work for a purpose and projects have a purpose. Purpose brings people together, but only if they really buy into it. And that purpose is not to burn up half a million – or 10 million – quid.
3. Experimentation and innovation. This one tends to get forgotten. We don’t understand everything around us and we are not painting by numbers, so we have to explore and experiment, and really try not to close too many doors too early on.
4. Drive for results. Emphasising people and purpose doesn’t mean that we can’t still aim for supreme performance. But great results come through people who feel that they belong and who want to be a part of solving problems.
5. If we want to take everyone with us, that calls for leadership. Sensible leadership, not heroic leadership. Leadership that takes responsibility, stewards resources and tries to leave things in a better shape than they were.

Listen to APM’s podcast with Professor Dalcher to find out more about project successes and failures.

Professor Dalcher is also a visiting professor at Drexel University in Pennsylvania and the University of Iceland; adjunct professor at SKEMA Business School; and a visiting fellow at the University of Warwick’s Warwick Manufacturing Group.

CV: Darren Dalcher

2018–present - Professor in strategic project management, Lancaster University Business School
2012–2018 - Professor of project management, University of Hertfordshire
2003–present - Director, National Centre for Project Management
2001–2012 - Professor of software project management, University of Middlesex
1992–2000 - Director, Forensic Systems Research Group, London South Bank University
1987 - PhD, software engineering, and lecturer, King’s College London

 

THIS ARTICLE IS BROUGHT TO YOU FROM THE SPRING 2022 ISSUE OF PROJECT JOURNAL, WHICH IS FREE FOR APM MEMBERS.