Once upon a time, there was a project manager.

This project manager was strong, motivated, and driven to succeed. She was certified, the PMBOK was her friend, and she could create the most amazing Gantt charts ever seen.

One day, she took on a new project.

This project was large and complex. It involved new technologies and many stakeholders. And the project team was — let’s just say — “challenging.”

But this didn’t scare our heroine. She created a fabulous Gantt chart, established milestones, and documented roles and responsibilities. She set up her cost management, time management, and quality management plans. And she doled out assignments to the project team with a confident smile.

The project went off track quickly.

Team members argued, stakeholders failed to participate, and serious roadblocks emerged. The project manager requested status updates, set up meetings, and reported to the steering team — all things that “good” project managers do. But eventually, she lost the gig.

Why? She either didn’t have — or didn’t use — critical soft skills that today’s strong, next-generation project manager absolutely must not only have — but also exercise.

Like this project manager (any resemblance to actual events or characters is purely coincidental), I come from a very “traditional” project management background. I’m a PMI member and a certified project management professional. The PMBOK is my friend too. Managing the triple constraints of time, cost, and scope motivated me for years. And while my traditional project management skills helped me lead most (but not all) of my projects to successful outcomes, they would have meant nothing without the ability to serve and enable the team, adapt to complexity, and flex appropriately.

A couple of days ago, Texas Stadium was reduced to a pile of rubble. Wow. The former home of my Dallas Cowboys, the site of victories and record-setting performances — gone in a matter of minutes. Was I sad? Yeah. But also a bit relieved. The Cowboys have moved to their new, super-duper (and quite ostentatious) stadium, Texas Stadium memorabilia has been auctioned off, and the poor, neglected building had become quite an eyesore.

Sometimes destroying something unusable is the best way to move forward.

Run that statement past your approach to documenting software requirements. When was the last time you took a step back to evaluate how your organization represents requirements? If it’s been awhile and your business analysts are still delivering massive, text-heavy, all-encompassing business requirements documents (BRDs), it’s time for some demolition of your own.

Why? Compelling forces have converged, drastically changing the way application development teams author software requirements. Organizations are recognizing the connection between software failure and poor requirements, and authoring better requirements has become a major initiative in many firms. At the same time, Lean and Agile are front and center, so right-sizing requirements documentation is on everyone’s radar. Bottom line, you need to do more with less: author stronger requirements while minimizing waste and being as lean as possible.

Hello fellow project managers! Are you ready for your future?

by Mary Gerush

During my first year as a Forrester analyst, one widespread pain point has made itself apparent: IT leaders wrestle with the subject of metrics, particularly in these challenging economic times. Most people I talk with are effective at collecting and reporting the basics: project on-time and on-budget performance, application up time, and help desk call statistics. But other measurements are more difficult to engineer. And there are so many things that can be measured; it’s difficult to figure out which ones really matter and are worth the time needed to collect and report them.