Project Manager Tips - Project Management and Music - In Search of an Adaptive Model

That probably sounds strange, but let me explain. I've had the
opportunity in my life to play classical music, to play rock and roll
at clubs and parties and with Elvis impersonators, and jazz with
people like Benny Goodman.

They all are different styles of music, they represent certain differences
and certain parallels in getting from the start to the end of a piece.
They all have a place, serve a function, have a following. You wouldn't
typically say one is right and one is wrong.

If you compared music to project management, you might say both
are a way of organizing people and their actions to generate certain
outputs. Yikes that sounds detached.

What I'm getting at is this:
Playing music is roughly equivalent to project managment.

When playing classical music, you play what's written, so that dozen's of
people can all produce and finish largely an exact copy of what was
originally penned. Very structured. Very defined. It is akin to one form
of project management as perhaps best applied to producing known
outcomes.

In playing the blues, you usually are working over a 12 bar chord
progression, with a particular use of thirds and a base pattern that
gives it that unmistakeable "blues" sound and feel. Much less exact
or prescribed than classical, yet it has a defined sequence and feel
that has to be created for it to sound "right" to the listeners. Again,
it represents a different form of project management. One that allows
more latitude, but still moves through various phases or gates.

When it comes to playing jazz, there's lots of room for freedom of
expression, interpretation, adaptation, how long you play the song
(e.g. how many repeats), what exact chords you play from verse to
verse, and for adapting to the unexpected%u2026

Jazz is still music, the players still work within a structure, they still start
and stop, they still produce an intended outcome. But if described in project
management terms, it's a very different model, perhaps more like Agile
than PMBOK (classical).

There are some strong parallels between project management and playing music.
Project management would benefit from embracing the fact that there are different forms of project management, just as there are different forms of music.

Part of the differentiator seems to be how much the project is to be a
replication of defined, known requirements, versus an improvised creation
with a roughly defined outcome (e.g. let's play Stella by Starlight in 3/4
instead of 4/4, key of G, you take the first chorus and we'll finish by playing
it one moretime through from the top).

The less we know the exact outcome and all the obstacles we will
have to overcome to reach a project outcome, the more project management
needs to move from a classical to blues, to jazz orientation.