Bringing Project Managers Out of Their Shell

Shell's project managers have a lot to deal with. Not just in the scale of the major projects, but also in the abundance of incertitude that they face. Nowadays not only do they have to tackle huge tasks like developing oil fields in difficult places and the alchemy of turning gas into liquids, they must also cope with the uncertainty and ambiguity of geopolitics and local issues. The excellent Shell Project Academy in Rijswijk, the Netherlands, invited Prof Eddie Obeng to join the Managing Complex Projects course. The course, run in collaboration with Cranfield and accredited by the Association for Project Management (of which Eddie is a Fellow), is designed to transform highly competent and very experienced project managers into leaders of complex foggy programmes of multiple competing stakeholders set in a world of confusion

Eddie introduced them to the World After Midnight, and took them on a journey to make complexity more simple by engaging shareholders early and being suspicious of certainty and painting by numbers. They explored how to not only feel comfortable being ‘lost in the Fog’ but to be suspicious if it all looks too straight forward. For the participants who have a track record of delivering in certainty, this should help them come out of their Shell.