When it’s time for a change, you know. What to do when you know, is often the challenge. Sometimes…. you have to break all the rules.

 

For as long as I can remember, rules always made sense to me. I like order and routine, with enough freedom for experimentation, imagination, and adventure. I had the best parents growing up and a truly amazing childhood. Mom and dad made sure we learned the value of hard work and figuring things out. We developed a strong foundation of morals and had tons of fun, but there were rules and plenty of structure. Still, we never felt stifled. It was always, “you never know until you try!”

They wanted us to stand on our own two feet based on our own convictions and always from a position of respect. To this day, the lessons I learned growing up form the basis of how I approach everything in my life – with purpose, values-centered, and never forgetting to find joy in the journey. So when a colleague of mine gave me a fascinating book, initially, I was skeptical.

First, Break All The Rules, from Gallup Press, sheds light on what the greatest managers do differently. There is a willingness to break the rules. The concept of breaking rules was foreign to me at the time, but now resonates well, particularly when applied in a slightly different context. Project management has too many rules and there are too many voices telling us we can’t break them, when that’s exactly what we need to do.

When we reach a crossroad in life as we inevitably do – multiple times – decisions have to be made. A choice can’t be avoided. For years, I worked hard, sacrificed and played by the rules to make my way in the complex world of professional services and in particular, IT project delivery. But the rules kept changing. The methods, frameworks, best practices, roles, and tools for managing projects were a moving target.

Every organization had its own variation, a different playbook, and you had to navigate transformation journeys while delivering major initiatives. The initiative fatigue was real, costly, and a major barrier to success in delivery. While the ways in which we manage project delivery morphed, interestingly, the challenges, lessons learned, drivers of success and failure, did not. Rather than learning and growth, it was a constant cycle of putting out fires. And somehow, the creativity and artistry of project delivery was lost. It was always fodder for discussion during family dinners as my siblings and I all worked in a similar capacity – managing initiatives and…..people. The question became, what could be done?

Fortunately, I wasn’t alone in the questions and the quest for a better way forward. After a number of conversations with colleagues and friends, a few ideation sessions, a bit of research and though probably not enough, a simple operational model was defined, infrastructure provisioned, content thrown up and we launched. What happens next promises to be an interesting journey!

While Delivery Artistry may have a different message, the reality is, it’s nothing new. It’s simply a reminder of what many already know, but may not publicly admit and often chose to ignore. We’re advocating for a path forward that is based on going back to the basics, reclaiming simple, effective, time-tested practices that yield results. We’re hoping to free practitioners across the spectrum of delivery from the rigidity and complexity of the prolific number of methods, frameworks, tools and noise out there.

It’s nothing radical. We hope to create a moderate shift in thinking that will allow teams to embrace and benefit from real agility, creativity and independent thinking as we work to tackle big initiatives and daunting ideas. We’re saying it’s okay to deviate from commonly accepted schools of thought and conventional wisdom to ensure success in project delivery. Yes, we want to break all the rules. Well, maybe not all, but we’re breaking several for sure. Stay tuned, and thanks for your support.