Friendly Fire
The Methodology is for Everyone, not just the PM
You can assemble a squad of clever, confident people who can recite the plan word for word — and still watch them produce a disaster. Why? Because if the whole crew hasn’t been schooled in the same structured approach, you get the most demoralizing kind of failure there is: friendly fire. More often than not, coming from the generals above, unaware of the engagement model, i.e., the project methodology.
Small mistakes from those on “your side” unaware of the marching orders, which line up like James Reason’s slices of Swiss cheese, creating a path for disaster to walk straight through the holes.
Why Structure Isn’t Optional
A method isn’t a luxury; it’s a vaccine. And to achieve herd immunity, everyone needs to be vaccinated. The idea of the lone hero - the method certified PM - improvising a win belongs in cheap thrillers.
Standards don’t just tidy up paperwork in order to please your internal auditor — they make roles, checkpoints, and who-decides-what so clear that the organization moves like a marching band, not a garage jam session.
What This Training Actually Means
It isn't about polishing every specialist until they shine. It’s about making sure everyone shares the same proficiency in your chosen method, so that they all:
work from the same playbook (documents, meetings, controls),
know the checkpoints, the roles, and who gets the final say,
And catch the usual small errors before they snowball into a real failure.
Real success comes from people knowledgeable enough on project execution to agree on the way forward.
The Tax You Pay When You Don’t
Neglecting to educate all on the methodology will make you pay dearly for:
Signal loss with stakeholders;
Ownership so muddled that decisions ooze rather than occur;
Ad-hoc patchwork that saws through quality and schedule;
And shadow systems that disperse “truth” across competing spreadsheets.
Read enough Issue Logs, and you’ll get sick of the same conclusion: thin training plus fuzzy procedure equals harm that was entirely avoidable.
What “Good” Looks Like
Educate before kickoff, not mid-flight. Teaching your method while the house is on fire is how manuals end up as evidence at the inquest.
Do it for everyone, not just the project manager. Making the PM the sole keeper of the sacred knowledge is both unfair and ineffectual.
Clarify role-specific responsibilities: who decides, when, on which inputs, and when to escalate. Not every type of decision is made democratically. The user representative on a board evaluates the implications of various technological options, but should not always have the final word. Especially not when it comes to signing off on "known bugs”. Read I Am Spartacus for more on that.
And for big projects with lots of handoffs, General Stanley McChrystal’s book Team of Teams makes a point worth borrowing: shared method comes first, speed follows — it’s a result, not a shortcut.
On Institutional Responsibility
Asking a PM to…
lead a team that’s never been trained in the company’s own method,
report to a Board that is not fluent in the methodology,
inside a company that hasn’t mastered it either.
…isn’t a plan; it’s a mistake dressed up as one.
What follows won’t be “learning on the job.” It’ll be losing the same way twice, capped off with a tidy post-mortem listing the training that would have saved everyone the public embarrassment and tombstones reading “Agile in Name Only”. These tombstones have reportedly sold out.
Last Word
No generals were harmed writing this, but the rule is older than most military uniforms: agree on the rules of engagement, then run the mission. Getting everyone aligned isn’t a nice extra — it’s what makes the team stronger than the sum of its parts.
Skilled people, trained in the same method, are your best shot at getting out alive — especially when you’re dropped into the swamp of corporate politics and the quiet sabotage of people who exploit the process-knowledge gaps present in both the army brass and the cannon fodder.