Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales to take part in scheme to make research freely available online:

I have to say I wholly agree with the sentiment of: http://tgr.ph/JRPaWz, Peer Review is lauded as the 'gold standard' for academia. However, I am obliged to point out the pitfalls:


1. The research becomes sanitised versions of what the authors may wish to say.
2a. Publishers much prefer text rather than diagrams. Diagrams take up valuable space and are difficult to produce. For someone with a visual communication style this is incredibly frustrating as diagrams become removed (e.g. compare Prof Elena P. Antonacopoulou's "Creating Actionable Knowledge for Impact Practising, Learning and Learning" in PDF form to "Impact and Scholarship: Unlearning and Practising to Co-create Actionable Knowledge", the updated article in Management Learning 40(4) 421-430). The all-important diagram for triple loop learning has disappeared.
2b. This makes the product less readable. There's nothing more off-putting than reams and reams of text.... a picture paints a thousand words :-)
3. The business model is absolutely crazy! We are buying back work academics have produced. We are locked in to this system as promotion depends on publication in good journals. Then, we need the good journals to refer to for our research. The publishers are making profits from the public purse.
4. We are required to genuflect to editors who have power over where, how and if your article is published. Thus, one is asked to add references (often the editors own work) which may or may not add to the final article. 
5. I appreciate that knowledge is sedimentary. However, one becomes obliged to add references to work, simply to acknowledge that you are aware that it exists (even if you don't agree with it).
6. Even after all this rigorous process errors still exist. For example in Management Learning 43(1) p.114 Chris Argyris (1993, 2000) is credited with 'action learning philosophy. "Wtf?" is the note I made in the margin. I've read most of Chris's work, which is mainly concerned with action science. The action learning philosophy comes through Reg Revans. How did this glaring error get past the editors?
7. The pipelines for the top journals are obscene. The whole purpose of journals were they were quicker to produce than books. With print on demand this is no longer the case. However, due to a tradition we have been unwittingly locked in to, we have forgotten the original purpose of journals to promulgate knowledge. How does a two-year pipeline serve anybody except the publishers and editorial elite?
8. I've saved the best till last. Students deserve to access research so they are working on contemporary topics. Not just our students at our institutions, but students throughout the world. I believe Universities have a responsibility to propagate knowledge independent of partisan motives or profit motives.


Thus, my conclusions are that whilst I can live, for the most-part with the politics of publication, this business model is not sustainable and should be scrapped as early as possible. Free access to publicly funded research: bring it on!

Emirates CEO sees room for more US destinations

I had the pleasure of meeting Sheik Ahmed at the Graduation Ceremony of MBA Cohort 3 at the Emirates Aviation College in Dubai. I was impressed with his modest and approachable leadership style, as demonstrated in this interview:

http://www.businessweek.com/ap/2012-05/D9UG0BEO0.htm

Is Project Management a Profession?

This debate goes back as far as Henry Ford II’s claim that good managers can run anything  (Perrow 1970). However contradictory evidence exists when one author claims that:

... this is dangerous thinking that has implications for management development... that they are interchangeable when it is actually highly contextualised (Mintzberg 2004).

According to Mintzberg  (2004) teaching homogenises. Thus, there is a danger in project management education that it can all appear to be the same when, in fact, it is not.  The question then arises as to what we mean by a profession?

When a business firm hires an accountant, a dietician, a doctor, or a sanitary engineer, it hires not only an individual but also a large number of standard operating procedures that have been trained into the new member of the organization by outside agencies. One of the important consequences of professionalization in general is that extra-organizational groups have the responsibility of providing task performance rules for the organization (Cyert and March 1992, pp.124-125).

Elliot and Hughes  (1998) claim the following characteristics need to be present for an occupation to call itself a profession; the development of an epistemology of practice, an ideal of service, the formation of a professional community, the designation of a degree of autonomy and independence, and a code of ethics. Alvesson (2004) meanwhile claims that professions are distinguished by such aspects as a code of ethics, standardized education and criteria for certification, a strong professional association, monopolisation of a particular labour market through the regulation of entry.

Project management seems to meet most of the criteria, with the exception of monopolisation of a particular labour market through the regulation of entry and the designation of a degree of autonomy and independence. The term ‘project manager’ is not a protected term, and not a protected profession such as a medical doctor or police. It is not possible to get arrested for impersonating a project manager. Thus, without the former, it is impossible to have the latter.

Professional bodies such as the Association of Project Managers (APM) in the UK and the Project Management Institute (PMI) in the US have enjoyed rapid expansion over the past ten years (Meredith and Mantel 2010). Thus the criteria of strong professional association and the formation of a professional community are met. However, it needs to be pointed out that membership is not dependent on the right to practice. Both institutes extol their respective Bodies of Knowledge. Below, for example, is the APM’s Fifth Edition of their Body of Knowledge (Association for Project Management 2006).

Section 1 Project management in context
1.1	Project management
1.2	Programme management
1.3	Portfolio management
1.4	Project context
1.5	Project sponsorship
1.6	Project office
Section 2 Planning the strategy
2.1	Project success and benefits management
2.2	Stakeholder management
2.3	Value management
2.4	Project management plan
2.5	Project risk management
2.6	Project quality management
2.7	Health, safety and environmental management
Section 3 Executing the strategy
3.1	Scope management
3.2	Scheduling
3.3	Resource management
3.4	Budgeting and cost management
3.5	Change control
3.6	Earned value management
3.7	Information management and reporting
3.8	Issue management
Section 4 Techniques
4.1	Requirements management
4.2	Development
4.3	Estimating
4.4	Technology management
4.5	Value engineering
4.6	Modelling and testing
4.7	Configuration management
Section 5 Business and commercial
5.1	Business case
5.2	Marketing and sales
5.3	Project financing and funding
5.4	Procurement
5.5	Legal awareness
Section 6 Organisation and governance
6.1	Project life cycles
6.2	Concept
6.3	Definition
6.4	Implementation
6.5	Handover and closeout
6.6	Project reviews
6.7	Organisation structure
6.8	Organisational roles
6.9	Methods and procedures
6.10	Governance and project management
Section 7 People and the profession
7.1	Communication
7.2	Teamwork
7.3	Leadership
7.4	Conflict management
7.5	Negotiation
7.6	Human resource management
7.7	Behavioural characteristics
7.8	Learning and development
7.9	Professionalism and ethics

Clearly, by the definitions provided for by Elliot and Hughes  (1998) and Alvesson (2004) the PMBoK has an epistemology enshrined as a body of knowledge. An ideal of service and ethics, meanwhile, is enshrined under Section 7.9. Furthermore schemes like the APM Foundation Certificate and PRINCE2 demonstrates standardised education and criteria for certification.

However, project management in practice can be described as a ‘... complex and esoteric systems of expertise’  (Berger and Luckman 1991, p.60-61) with complex act of knowing (Snowden 2002). This is a limitation of any body of knowledge (Lave 1993). as ‘... traditional conceptions of knowledge as abstract, disembodied, individual and formal are unrealistic’ (Blackler 2004, p.351).

... obeying someone else’s prescription requires a partial substitution for one’s best judgement. The simpler and more practical prescriptions sound, the more trust one puts in them, and so the more danger they pose. For another thing, effective methods of getting things done respect the constraints and exploit the opportunities that distinguish specific situations. (Nystrom and Starbuck 2004, pp. 105-6)

Thus, whilst the bodies of knowledge are an attempt to make complex acts of knowing explicit (Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995) most project managers accumulate this tacitly (ibid.) through on-the job experience.  Thus we are left with the concept of the ‘decontextualized over the situated’ (Brown and Duguid 1991, p.45):

.... educationalist [in this context, professional bodies] assume that knowledge can be divorced from context and transmitted as abstract data or as universally applicable approaches to problem solving; learning is not a passive process... but an active one. (Blackler 2004, p.351).

Indeed Tichy (2004, p.228) neatly summarises this debate with the idea that there are ‘... no more textbook answers; leaders must write their own textbooks’.

 In conclusion then “is project management a profession” is somewhat misleading as it produces only one of two answers. The question should really be to what extent is management a profession. The discussion is, in all honesty, something of a red herring. It doesn’t really matter whether we think management if a profession or not. What we can all agree on is that there is much we can do to professionalise it.

Alvesson, Mats (2004). Knowledge work: ambiguity, image and identity. How Organizations Learn: Managing the Search for Knowledge. K. Starkey, S. Tempest and A. McKinlay. London, Thompson: 385-406.

Association for Project Management (2006). APM Body of Knowledge, Association for Project Management (Fifth Edition)

Berger, Peter and Luckman, Thomas (1991). The Social Construction of Reality. London, Penguin

Blackler, Frank (2004). Knowledge, knowledge work amd organizations: an overview and interpretation. How Organizations Learn: Managing the Search for Knowledge. K. Starkey, S. Tempest and A. McKinlay. London, Thompson: 339-362.

Brown, John Seely and Duguid, Paul (1991). "Organizational Learning and Communities of Practice: Towards a Unified View of Working, Learning and Innovation." Organization Science 2(1): 40-57.

Cyert, R.M. and March, J.G. (1992). A Behavioral Theory of the Firm. Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Blackwell (2nd)

Elliot, B. and Hughes, C. (1998). Outcomes driven curriculum reform - reconstructing teacher work and professionalism. European Conference for Educational Research. Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Lave, J. (1993). The practice of learning. Understanding Practice: Perspectives on Activity and Context. S. Chaiklin and J. Lave. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press: 3-32.

Meredith, Jack R. and Mantel, Samuel J. (2010). Project Management: A Managerial Approach. New Jersey, John Wiley & Sons (Seventh Edition)

Mintzberg, Henry (2004). Managers not MBAs: A Hard Look at the Soft Practice of Managing and Management Development. London, Prentice Hall

Nonaka, Ikujiro and Takeuchi, Hirotaka (1995). The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation. Oxford, Oxford University Press

Nystrom, Paul C. and Starbuck, William H. (2004). To avoid organizational crises, unlearn. How Organizations Learn: Managing the Search for Knowledge. K. Starkey, S. Tempest and A. McKinlay. London, Thompson: 100-111.

Perrow, Charles (1970). Organization Analysis: A Sociological View. London, Tavistock Publications

Snowden, David (2002). "Complex acts of knowing: paradox and descriptive self-awareness." Journal of Knowledge Management 6(2).

Tichy, Noel M. (2004). GE's Crotonville: a staging ground for a corporate revolution. How Organizations Learn: Managing the Search for Knowledge. K. Starkey, S. Tempest and A. McKinlay. London, Thompson: 224-237.