Expedient Project Management

The Expedient Project Manager

The expedient project manager knows that no project is ever done on time without cutting the deliverables, and also knows that without an ambitious plan there is no hope of accomplishing anything meaningful. The expedient project manager believes in Pareto, the 80% solution; the goal of engineering is to make something that works.

The expedient project manager lives in the safe space between ambition and deniability.

“There’s never time to do it right, but there’s always time to do it over.” That’s how executive management must execute when they are responsible for quarterly profits. Today is far more valuable than tomorrow. That’s the reality for most project managers and the source of most of our pain.

How to do the job well, maintain sanity, keep your sense of humor, AND deliver?

Does your company have a quality policy? And when push comes to shove, does the VP of R&D tell you to trip the schedule and iron out the bugs or does she say wrap it up and deal with problems after going to production?

Here’s what your various executives are worried about: Profits & Risks (Compliance being a big one).

PMI guidelines are useful and necessary, and represent the triumph of process over progress. Large construction consultancies, aerospace projects, etc. require careful planning and control processes, but are they useful to us in medical device design? Or are they a good idea from the industrial age that has too much overhead for the better/faster/cheaper world we live in? (So, how does Toyota do a project?)

To my mind, the PMP is good to know and embodies a lot of hard-earned knowledge which must be applied with considerable selectivity to avoid the problem of the logically consistent schema.

MDD steps exist due to regulation, some of it rational, some a bit arbitrary and include:

• Design Input

• Design Output

• Verification

• Validation

• Design Transfer

Similarly, there are parallel requirements for Human Factors Engineering and Risk Management when we merge the ISO and FDA guidances. All of which together seems like an impenetrable thicket.

The expedient project manager doesn’t think of the rules as a set of handcuffs or limitations, but rather a list of items to improvise on - sometimes a single tweak resolves a lot of compliance, or just one sidebar study crosses off a lot of boxes. Where traditional project managers act like the symphony conductor, the expedient project manager epitomizes the lead guitarist in a funk band - keep the tempo, set the key, and deliver.