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.