“The best-laid schemes o’ mice an ‘men Gang aft agley” Robert Burns.

“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” – General Dwight Eisenhower.

Robert Burns was probably a project manager, to express it so vividly. General Eisenhower as the chief of the Allied Forces, certainly managed many projects successfully.

Traditional project management techniques derived greatly from the World War, with focus on logistics and resource mobilization. Today, with IT driving development across industries, the traditional techniques aren’t enough. You need smarter project management to manage situations where people work around the world, the resources are the skills of the project team, and communications becomes either the bottleneck or the enabler.

Smarter project management doesn’t mean that you do away with old techniques. Rather, you build on them, adding building blocks like data repositories for knowledge sharing, standardized templates for smooth handover, communication practices for bringing everyone together when required, and training new entrants to ramp up to speed.

The most important element of smarter project management is the metrics used to measure success. Instead of a single cost or time measure, metrics are tailored to users, the company, and the project team.

For users, it’s about ease of adoption and use. In the background, training and maintainability are also factors.

For the company, it’s about time, budget, and return on investment.

For the project team, it’s about team working, sense of accomplishment, acknowledgment of contributions, and shared learning.

Ultimately, the success of the project is evaluated based on success on all these measures, which requires smart project management.