Managing Projects in Lehmann’s Terms
On Training | On Project Types | On Project Business | First Steps | On Leadership
I) On Project Management Training
1. Project managers need methodical enrichment, but, sadly, the trend is towards impoverishment.
In today’s rapidly evolving business environment, project managers must deal with increasing complexity, tighter constraints, and heightened expectations, yet organizations often fail to invest adequately in their development.
Instead of enriching project managers with the diverse tools and authority needed to navigate these challenges, there is a tendency to burden them with administrative tasks, restrictive frameworks, and inadequate resources. This systematic undervaluation not only stifles their self-esteem, but also erodes their capacity to deliver successful outcomes and takes away the joy of running projects.
Skilled project management is critical for driving strategic initiatives and adapting to change; empowering project managers with greater autonomy, professional growth opportunities, and support is essential to unlocking their full potential and fostering organizational success.
2. We must train more approaches than just “Agile and Waterfall”.
Project management is not black and white. It encompasses a wide array of approaches beyond the commonly claimed Agile and Waterfall dichotomy. These include Rolling wave and Progressive elaboration, which stand between Agile’s flexibility and Waterfall’s predictive structure
These diverse approaches allow project managers to tailor strategies to specific industries, project scopes, and team dynamics, ensuring greater adaptability and efficiency.
The false dichotomy of “Agile vs. Waterfall” is another example of point 1, the methodical impoverishment of professionals at a time when they need to be enriched.
3. We trainers must keep up accuracy in language, but students should also learn not to expect this from others.
Misunderstandings are among the top ten causes of trouble and conflicts in projects.
Training accuracy in language emphasizes clarity, precision, and correctness in communication, helping students to express themselves clearly and professionally. However, it’s equally important for them to recognize that most people they deal with do not command the same level of accuracy and may never learn it.
4. Certification is not a tool to meet expectations. It is there to set them.
Certification does not guarantee competence; it establishes a baseline for expectations.
The learning process for the exam provides project managers with standardized terminology and a structured approach to methods. However, real-world success depends on their ability to apply these tools effectively under pressure. Discipline is required to maintain consistency in execution, even when challenges arise. Strong willpower drives them to push through obstacles and ensure project success.
Ultimately, certification is just a part in a mosaic—true mastery comes when professionals add experience and perseverance.
II) On the Various Types of Projects
1. Internal projects support a business. Customer projects are the business.
In contrast to an internal project, which is a cost center done to support a business, a customer project is a profit center. It is the business performed to bring money home.
Internal projects run into trouble when the project manager’s position and authorization are left unclear. Customer projects run into trouble when the project manager ignores his or her responsibility as the manager of a profit center.
2. Greenfield projects work best in isolation. In Brownfield projects, you must build strong rapport with stakeholders.
Greenfield projects, starting from scratch, benefit from isolation as they allow for a clean slate, minimal external constraints, and streamlined decision-making without legacy issues. In contrast, Brownfield projects involve modifying, expanding or replacing existing infrastructure, requiring careful coordination with stakeholders who have expectations, vested interests, historical knowledge, and operational concerns.
Strong rapport with these stakeholders is crucial to navigating resistance, leveraging institutional expertise, and ensuring smooth integration of changes into the existing environment.
3. Mark-1 projects are done for the first time. They have more freedom but also greater challenges than Mark-n projects.
Mark-1 projects are pioneering initiatives, executed without prior templates or proven methodologies, requiring teams to navigate uncharted territory with innovation and adaptability. While they offer greater freedom in decision-making and design choices, they also pose significant risks due to unknown variables, lack of historical data, and potential resistance to change.
In contrast, Mark-n projects benefit from established best practices and past experiences but may be constrained by predefined structures, limiting opportunities for groundbreaking advancements.
More on the types of projects:
Situational Project Management
The Dynamics of Success and Failure
By Oliver F. Lehmann
ISBN 9781498722612
Publisher: Auerbach Publications
III) On Project Business
1. Project Business takes place when two or more organizations cooperate to do a project together.
In Project Business, customers and contractors collaborate on a project, each bringing unique resources, expertise, and management attention, working under contractual obligations to achieve a shared goal. Unlike internal projects managed within a single entity, these ventures involve complex coordination, legal frameworks, and financial agreements between independent parties.
Success in Project Business depends on trust, transparency, and effective management of cross-corporate relationships to mitigate risks and ensure value creation for all stakeholders.
2. Project Business is high-risk business for all parties involved.
Project Business involves significant financial, operational, and strategic risks for all parties, as projects often operate under tight deadlines, complex contracts, and unpredictable external factors. Contractors face the challenge of balancing costs, resources, and profitability, while customers must manage project scope, quality, and dependency on external suppliers.
The inherently cross-corporate nature of project business amplifies risks related to coordination, trust, and accountability, making effective risk management a critical success factor.
3. Managers and customers love to make decisions based on numbers. Give them false numbers, and they will make poor decisions.
Managers and customers rely heavily on numerical data to justify decisions, allocate resources, and assess risks, often assuming that the figures presented to them are accurate and meaningful. When false or misleading numbers—whether due to errors, manipulation, or misinterpretation—enter the equation, these stakeholders may confidently make choices that lead to inefficiencies, financial losses, or even project failure.
The illusion of precision that numbers provide can make bad decisions appear well-founded, ultimately eroding trust, increasing risk, and damaging both business outcomes and professional reputations.
More on Project Business:
By Oliver F. Lehmann
ISBN 9780367522070
Publisher: Auerbach Publications
IV) The First Critical Steps to Do when You’re Assigned to a Project
1. Clarify your role!
Project failure often begins with unclear authorization and role definition: Clarify right at the beginning of your assignment:
- What am I authorized to decide and to do?
- What am I not authorized to decide and to do?
- Who will champion my project and support me as the project’s sponsor and direct escalation channel?
- When I run into capacity conflicts between my work for the project and other daily tasks, what has priority?
The document to lay down the answers to these questions for later reference is the Project Charter.
2. Have a glossary of key terms!
Misunderstandings are among the top causes of trouble in projects.
A project glossary of terms is essential for establishing a shared language among all stakeholders, particularly in complex environments involving multiple departments, disciplines, or external partners.
Internal projects often suffer from communication breakdowns due to assumptions that everyone interprets terminology the same way—when in reality, even common terms can have wildly different meanings depending on role or function. A well-maintained glossary reduces ambiguity, aligns expectations, and shortens ramp-up time for new team members. It acts as a single source of truth that helps prevent costly misunderstandings and repeated clarification cycles.
In customer projects, especially those that are cross-corporate or span different cultures, industries, or technical domains, a glossary becomes even more critical. It supports contractual clarity, ensuring that everyone agrees on the definitions behind scope items, deliverables, and technical concepts. This is particularly important when dealing with performance obligations, acceptance criteria, or legal interpretations. Without a shared glossary, every meeting runs the risk of misalignment, and every document becomes a potential dispute waiting to happen. A project glossary isn’t just good practice. It’s cheap “quick-win” insurance against the chaos of poor communication.*
A glossary may be developed specifically for a project. It may also be provided by a Project Management Office (PMO) for the entire organization.
*: A template for a cross-corporate glossary can be found at https://project-business.org/tools/project-business-glossary.
3. Understand the business intentions that underly the project!
When you step into a new project or take over an existing one, identifying the business intentions behind it should be your first strategic move.
This means going beyond the project charter to uncover why the organization or the customer want the project delivered in the first place. You should start by engaging with the project sponsor, senior stakeholders, or account managers to ask pointed questions:
- What does success really look like?
- What business problem are we solving?
- What outcome are we betting on?
These conversations often reveal priorities not listed in official documents—like market timing, competitive pressure, customer satisfaction, or internal politics. The goal is to get a clear, executive-level understanding of the intended business impact.
Next, you should validate and contextualize these intentions with the operational realities. That includes understanding how the project ties into strategic goals, how value will be measured (cost savings, revenue generation, compliance, etc.), and what trade-offs are acceptable.
If it’s a customer project, this also means decoding the contract to understand not just the deliverables, but the performance expectations and pain points the customer is trying to resolve. You should document these business intentions and circulate them with key stakeholders for alignment, because if everyone isn’t working toward the same outcomes, it’s only a matter of time before the project veers off course.
V) On Leadership in Project Management
1. Followers Make Leaders.
Leadership is not just about individual traits but about the relationship between leaders and their followers—without followers, there are no leaders.
Toxic leaders thrive when followers enable or tolerate their behavior, either out of fear, loyalty, or personal gain. Without followers who comply, excuse, or support their actions, toxic leaders lose their influence and power. This dynamic means that organizations with strong, ethical followership can resist or remove harmful leadership.
In short, toxic leadership persists because followers allow it—consciously or unconsciously—making them complicit in the problem.
2. Each project is a new learning process. High-pressure environments make people learn wrong things.
In high-pressure project environments, learning often becomes distorted by urgency and social stress.
Instead of absorbing good practices, individuals adapt to survive, reinforcing habits that prioritize speed over sound decision-making. Risk assessments and structured planning are frequently bypassed in favor of immediate problem-solving, creating an illusion of efficiency. When quick fixes yield short-term success, they become ingrained as standard practice, even if they introduce long-term vulnerabilities. Over time, these reactive behaviors replace methodical learning, making teams more dependent on crisis management rather than prevention.
High-pressure environments are also prone to work left abandoned “almost finished” with results that are neither useful nor safe.
Without structured reflection, flawed lessons go unchallenged, leading to repeated mistakes in future projects. True learning requires not just experience, but also the ability to critically assess outcomes and refine approaches—something that pressure-driven environments rarely allow.
3. Tyrants live miserable lives.
Tyrants make our lives hard in work, business, and elsewhere.
Tyrants, consumed by their own insecurities and fears, project their misery onto others to feel a fleeting sense of power and control. They surround themselves with suffering, believing that making others weak or fearful will somehow mask their own inadequacies. By inflicting pain, they seek validation, as if dominance over others can compensate for their own deep unhappiness.
Their cruelty becomes a twisted distraction from their own failures, allowing them to avoid confronting their own inner emptiness. In the end, their misery only deepens, as they isolate themselves in a world of fear and hatred, forever chasing relief they will never truly find.
4. How can we avoid toxic leaders?
Avoid toxic leaders by recognizing red flags like arrogance, blame-shifting, and lack of accountability early on. Build a strong, ethical culture with clear reporting structures and leadership KPIs that prioritize collaboration and integrity.
If a toxic leader is already in place, document their behavior, limit their influence, and push for intervention or removal. Protect yourself by setting boundaries, building internal support networks, and preparing an exit strategy if the toxicity is systemic. Organizations that value both results and people are the best defense against toxic leadership.
