The evolution of a pivotal profession

Ruth Murray-Webster reflects on how project management has burst out of its original straitjacket.

When I first joined APM in 1998, I had been leading organisational change initiatives for a decade. I had been trained in the mid-1980s to understand objectives, decompose scope, put together resourced schedules and budgets, and to consider potential threats and opportunities. My work focused on implementing strategy and delivering measurable improvements. I passed my APMP (now PMQ) and became an APM member.

I joined a project management consultancy where my experience leading the people side of change was recognised and valued, but my experience somehow wasn’t seen to be project management. The ‘products’ of my projects had been changed organisational routines and behaviours rather than physical assets. I remember HR specialists who argued that planned organisational change was far more complicated than project management – that it was a separate discipline.

The interest in programme management in the early noughties gave the permission for entrenched positions on projects and project management to be reconsidered – for the role of projects in ‘internal change’, in strategy implementation, to find a home. But there was an unhelpful terminology war between projects and programmes with futile attempts to put ‘clear blue water’ between the two.

I became fascinated with risk management through a people-not-process lens, and forged a professional practice around delivering strategic change in risky and important contexts. It was a shock to find when I started my doctoral research in 2008 that there were people in academia, too, who had compartmentalised project management into something to do with the built environment or information systems, whereas organisational change was seen to be something to do with strategy, leadership and HR.

I was both honoured and slightly amused in 2018 to be asked to be editor of the seventh edition of the APM Body of Knowledge. APM has broadened its perspectives and reach over the years, and I’m sure this will continue. APM continues to embrace that delivering the desired benefits from investments in change requires a grasp of all the ‘hard’ techniques (to plan, monitor, control) and all the ‘soft’ techniques (to bring people along, too, working with the politics and conflict), and an ability to do this in a context of disruption.

Organisations now realise that the most difficult part of planned (project-based) change is reconciling the tensions between the structural difficulties of delivering scope at pace, the sociopolitical difficulties when people are involved and the emergent difficulties because little is stable in our world. I am proud to be part of a profession that has moved on, that is pivotal in delivering change for our world to thrive into the future.

Dr Ruth Murray-Webster Hon FAPM is Director of Potentiality UK, and an Associate Fellow at Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford.

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