A project manager joins a company and asks a reasonable question in the first week.
“Where do I find the project method. Templates, stage gates, that sort of thing.”
The answer arrives with a small proud smile.
“We do not really work like that here. We like to keep it flexible.”
By the end of the month, the new project manager has worked out how it actually works. Business cases go to Marion, but only after Dave has seen them, and nobody will tell you why. The Steering Committee does not take decisions in the meeting, it takes them afterwards, by email, in a thread you may or may not be on. You never put a risk in writing before you have raised it verbally with the sponsor. And the real deadline is two weeks before the stated deadline, because of the board pack.
None of that is written anywhere. All of it is enforced.
There is a method. There is always a method. It is simply undocumented, and there is no way to learn it except by getting it wrong in front of people who already know.
The Under-Elevens
Go and watch children play football on a Saturday morning. Soccer, for the Americans reading this.
Twenty children on the pitch and all twenty of them are within about five meters of the ball. Wherever it goes, they go, in one dense cluster, at speed. There is no defense, because defending means standing somewhere the ball is not, and there is no seven-year-old on earth who can be persuaded to do that.
It is not a lack of effort. Every child out there is running flat out, and every one of them is trying to win.
An organization without a documented method does exactly the same thing. Everybody converges on whatever is loudest that week. The escalated defect, the angry customer, the demo on Thursday.
And the work that means standing where the ball is not gets left. Nobody is forecasting next quarter’s cost. Nobody is keeping the risk log honest. Nobody is checking whether the thing being built is still the thing that was asked for, because none of that is where the noise is, and all of it looks like standing still.
Then there is the child who does hold position.
That child gets shouted at by the other children.
In an organization, that child is the project manager who insists on a change being priced before it is agreed, or who will not close a stage without acceptance criteria. Within about two months, that person has a reputation. Bureaucratic. Rigid. Not a team player.
Where This Actually Comes From
Almost nobody arrives at this after careful thought.
It usually comes from a real memory. A methodology was implemented once, and the implementation was theatre. A consultant, a thick binder, a slide deck explaining why everything would be better from now on. The project managers were trained. Nobody else was. The Steering Committee members, who have more influence over the outcome than anyone, never attended a single session and carried on exactly as before.
So it failed, visibly, and the conclusion drawn was that methodology does not work here.
The conclusion available was that the implementation was poor.
The fix is smaller than people fear. You do not need the thick binder. Pick something coherent, use a fraction of it, and write that fraction down. PRINCE2, an Agile framework, or a stripped-back version of either. Which one matters far less than two other things: that it is written down, and that the people who make the decisions are inside it rather than watching it.
At a minimum, four things need to exist on paper.
Who decides what, and at what value a decision moves up
What is baselined, and what happens when it has to change
Where risks go, who owns them, and what triggers an escalation
What done means, agreed before the work starts rather than after
That is a few pages. It is not a methodology implementation, it is a Tuesday.
What the Absence Costs
Somebody always carries the undocumented method. It lives in the heads of the three or four people who have been there longest, and they absorb the gap by working late and knowing who to call.
When they leave, it leaves with them.
And ambiguity is never neutral. It always favours somebody, and it is rarely the person doing the most careful work.
Children grow out of the clump. Somewhere around ten or eleven a coach finally explains that football is mostly about where you stand when you do not have the ball, and the cluster breaks apart, and the game starts.
Nobody grows out of it by being told to keep it flexible.