Podcast 11: The Debate about Project Management as a Soft Skill

Project management is not always considered a soft skill. Hosts Dr.
Tobin Porterfield and Bob Graham discuss its role as a soft skill
and discuss the criticism.
What Project Management Is
Bob Graham ‘1:06': We should probably start out first off with
defining what project management is and explaining why it fits into
our list of soft skills because most people, or some people, might
be thinking that they can take a course of project management in
college. Why are you saying it's a soft skill? 
Dr. Tobin Porterfield ‘1:23': Let's start that up. Let's start with
what project management is because we often see the term a lot. We
see it in job advertisements. It's prevalent out there. The term is
often misapplied and misunderstood. A lot of time people say that
it's time management. Project management certainly has elements of
managing your time and your resources. But it is another animal
from what we consider time management.
Routine Tasks
Porterfield ‘1:55': When I look at project management and I teach a
lot of courses on it, I start my students with “Look, our whole
lives, our work lives, our home lives — you can really bring
everything you do into two areas: either routine things, the things
I do everyday. I fill out my timesheet, I check my voice mail, I go
through my email, I do my report, I do month-end close. There are
things we do that are routine, that we just do. It's what we do in
our business world that just keeps the dollars flowing in. We sell
appliances or we develop apps and we launch them. It becomes very
routine.
When It Becomes a Project
Porterfield ‘2:31': But when something moves to the elevation of
being a project, that's important. To be a project, it has to meet
a couple of criteria. It has to have a start date and an end date.
There has to be a time component. We need to get this done. A big
one is that there needs to be a specific deliverable, a definable
thing, so that when we are done we know what we really
accomplished. The third one is a really easy one. That is that it
uses resources. But almost everything we do uses resources. I kid
my students by saying that me losing 30 pounds is something that
needs to happen and it's a project. But it's not really a project
because there isn't a start and end date. So it's not a project. In
reality, it's never going to happen. That's what we see with
organizations. They need to keep the routine going. They need to
keeping doing what they do.
Executing projects is how they move the organization forward.
Porterfield ‘3:30': It's how they launch that new project, open
that new location. For us as individuals, an individual project for
us might be to complete a certification, to write that book that
you always wanted to write. Projects fit that definition of start
and end date, use resources and a definable outcome. They need to
be treated differently. There's a mechanical skill set to project
management.
People Skills in Project Management
Porterfield ‘4:00': There a whole lot of people skills issues that
are in project management that in order to get things done that
integration has to happen. That's one of the reason why it earned a
place in our list of soft skills.
Graham ‘4:14': You looked at all of the academic literature you
could find to create our list of 55 soft skills. Didn't you find
some researchers who had clearly put project management in the list
of soft skills, not technical or hard skills?
Porterfield ‘4:34': Yes. We didn't just put it under our list
although it's an area that's important to us. Studies were done
that said project management clearly is a soft skill. Some could
make the case that it's not because in some fields like engi...

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