Eavesdropping on the attendees at the CBP Summit here in sunny Cambridge, Mass yielded the following gems:

“Project management is like a ‘black art’ to the executives … no one understands how it works. They kind of want it but are scared of it at the same time.”

“This merger is a little different, because they are keeping the team intact…”

“I worked in the space program, but never built a rocket; worked in the computer industry but never designed a chip … project management is transferable. It’s like Jack Welch said: he never made a lightbulb at GE but he was a great CEO.”

“If I were naming PMI today, I think I’d name it something different. The People Management Institute. The Process Management Institute. The Performance Management Institute. The focus on the project makes us blind to the larger issues.”

“We’re looking for predictable outcomes … instead of the ‘project black hole’.”

“My company is back in the 80s. How do you fast-forward through project management into strategic management-by-projects?”

… It’s exciting - but also daunting - to hear the recipients of the PMO of the Year awards describe what they’ve done - and the speed with which some of the improvements were implemented. Stay tuned for some brief interviews with the Award winner and the finalists later today and tomorrow.

Meanwhile, if you have an answer for that last question: we are all ears.

… but I seem to be facing the New Year - and the news cycle - with a sense of unreasonable optimism. Partly this is because I’ve been paging through all my favorite business and projects news sources deciding what to put in our blogroll (check it out in the right-hand column!) There are some really smart people writing about what’s just ahead for projects in the current economic situation, and they can’t all be wrong. The guardedly expressed good news falls under three general headings:

1. “Project Management Eats Economic Downturn for Breakfast.”

2.  “Innovation Eats Recession for Breakfast.”

3. “Green/Alternative Economy Fixes Breakfast for the Planet. Chai, Anyone?”

There’s also, of course, a healthy serving of gloom and doom. Most of it, though, reminds me of something my father once said. Born in 1911, he was one of the last of the hot-type typographers - a craft with tools and methods pretty much unchanged for 400 years. When the little specialty shop where he plied his antique trade finally closed, and he had to learn computer typesetting (in his sixties), he hated it. But, as a game survivor of two World Wars and the Great Depression, he told me philosophically, “when the automobile came along, the wheelwrights and harness makers had to learn something new or go out of business. That’s life.”

Indeed. That said, life can be pretty rough on us when we refuse to recognize which of our self-defeating behaviors need changing. It’s tempting to believe that, because “business as usual” allowed us to have several decades of world-beating economic success, that the way we do business is the right way … the only way.

Project management has been somewhat of a corporate underdog for most of its history. One of the themes that I often heard among attendees at PMI conferences or our own Benchmarking Forums was, “We can’t get the C-level to listen to us!” That’s been changing in the last five years, as more and more companies implement PMOs at the enterprise level, and apply project portfolio management discipline as a tool for strategic execution. That’s why the present global economic situation - what Steve Forbes recently termed “a perfect storm” of conditions affecting nearly all sectors of the economy in nearly every nation - offers those skilled in practicing the discipline and mindset of “managing by projects” a unique opportunity. Project leaders are poised to have the ear of executives, thanks to their tireless trudge up from the trenches - but also are still somewhat “outsiders,” with views just different enough to offer the kind of systemic change companies need. It’s a shame that we had to reach near-collapse before the wisdom of project leaders could get a full hearing at the highest levels of business but - as one wise man said - “that’s life.”