Can it be that PM best practices -- aren't ?

 I've always found it ironic that the major and minor consultancies around DC are paid billions of dollars every year to continue providing the same advice on best practices that (in the of project management anyway) have been largely unchanged since the 1980s.  There are only a few possible explanations for this:

• Consultants are very bad at providing advice.  
• The advice the consultants are giving is very bad.  In other words, all this project management stuff is just a bunch of malarkey.  
• The clients are incapable of implementing the advice they are paying so much for. 
• The clients do not wish to implement the advice that are paying so much for.  which would mean that they really do not care.  In which case, why would they continue to pay for it?  (And why would we keep giving them all this money for work if they don't care whether it gets done or not)?

Did I miss an obvious answer?

Although the fourth choice (they don't care) seems like an easy answer in these days, I don't think I am ready for that one just yet.  There are too many cases I know of where public servants really are trying to get things done. And too many case where, despite their best efforts, nothing seems to happen.

The third choice (incompetence): the vast majority of public employees are pretty sharp and very hard-working.  Maybe they aren't ready for Silicon Valley or Seattle, but for the most part we're not talking about those skill sets. Federal employees must be able to define, plan and oversee a project, with enough technical knowledge to avoid getting too much of a snow-job.  I think the agencies have lots of people answering to that description. Whether they are allowed to exercise those skills goes to the fourth option. Maybe public-sector IT projects are biting off more than anyone can possibly chew?  Clinger-Cohen and later policies have tried to address that by requiring delivered capabilities within 12-18 months, but that has been largely ignored (see option 4). If we really believe that the public-sector is simply unable to attract the skilled labor needed to manage and execute IT projects that are otherwise perfectly feasible, then we have to figure out a way to get someone else to be responsible for delivering these highly-complex projects.  Not just contracting out - that's what we do now.  It would require a pretty creative solution.

Option 1: I'm not opposed to laying some of this at the feet of the consultancies, which after all have a vested interest in a permanent presence.  So maybe they are providing over-engineered solutions that are theoretically elegant but quite impractical and so never quite take root.  But in that case their advisory services should be equally ineffective in the private sector, where in fact it does seem to work (or maybe we just do not get to hear about those failures?).  Maybe the people buying the services need to take a look at why private-sector IT seems to have moved so far ahead of the public sector.  Or else only the newest or worst consultants are being used on public-sector accounts.  If you agree with option one, then you should be looking at a major business opportunity.

Well, if you're not buying any of that, there's option 2: it's all hocus-pocus.  As a certified project manager and architect, I'm supposed to (and do) believe that these disciplines can work together to produce efficient and effective solutions.  It seems self-evident that an organized approach has to work better than just muddling through. Yet so many organizations seem to operate on that opposing premise, and they not only survive but thrive (even if their projects are frequently fiascos).  Ulp.

In this confusing environment, we must be very clear about the intended benefit of any governance practice.

• If the organization doesn't want it, there will be no benefit from any investment in it.
• If the benefits of governance as compared to the status quo are not crystal clear, then the organization (especially those who benefit most from the status quo) will not want it.

If the benefit is not totally clear, then perhaps this piece of governance can wait while we focus on the parts that the organization will get behind.

What do you think?