Some people see project management as a roadblock to speedy delivery of critical projects. This is reinforced by the number of processes and documentation that can be involved in a project. After all, when a company is trying to meet market needs or break into trends, the last thing they need is a project manager saying, “We need to have all this documentation before we can start working on this.”

So how can project management be an effective tool vs. a roadblock? Do we throw everything out and just start executing on the work involved with minimal planning or processes? That is certainly one way to proceed. But, remember the word “execution” has several meanings. An execution of someone’s job could have an entirely different meaning than everyone was hoping for.

For project management to be an asset in critical time-to-market projects, it needs to be flexible and agile. Almost the opposite of the standardized way project management is supposed to work, which is careful and deliberate. Can this be accomplished? In a word, yes.

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