Modern project management was born from the problem of coordinating many diverse activities toward a common goal. Kelley and Walker's 1959 paper on Critical Path Planning and Scheduling begins there: large engineering projects require research, design, procurement, construction, vendors, fabricators, customers, and specialized skills to be directed toward completion. Their central insight was that unaided human beings could not cope with this complexity; when planning systems failed, "the management of the project is left to the coordinators and expediters.

That sentence captures the problem this essay addresses. Coordination is necessary, but when it dominates, it displaces real project management. Instead of making technical and commercial decisions, developing people, managing relationships, and protecting the enterprise's long-term interests, managers are consumed by schedule reconciliation, resource priority fights, expediting, status meetings, and recovery from yesterday's surprises.

Crucially, coordination complexity is not inherent in project work. It arises because resources are limited.

If resources were unlimited, most coordination problems would disappear. Every activity could begin as soon as its technical predecessor was complete, and every project could get the people, equipment, materials, and attention it needed when it needed them. There would be no need to negotiate priorities, delay one job for another, move crews between projects, or decide which urgent problem came first. The plan would still matter, but coordination would be simple: follow the technical sequence and execute.

Kelley and Walker saw this clearly in their discussion of manpower leveling. The Critical Path Method, as originally developed, focused primarily on the technological requirements of the project; manpower and equipment availability were "conspicuous by their absence." The resulting schedules were technologically feasible, but not necessarily practical: they could require more manpower than was available or cause manpower needs to fluctuate sharply over time. The problem was not merely sequencing the work, but fitting that sequence into the real limits of available resources.

This is the pivot. The central burden of project management is the mismatch between the work that should be done and the resources available to do it. Once resources are limited, coordination becomes unavoidable: someone must decide what waits, what proceeds, who gets the scarce expert, which crew moves, which delivery matters most, and which commitment is allowed to slip.

These decisions are not neutral. They determine whether the right work is done at the right time, whether people are protected from constant interruption, whether commitments are competitive and credible, and whether scarce capacity is used to do all the work it can. In a resource-constrained environment, coordination decisions become business decisions. Done well, coordination enables more work to be completed with the same resources. Done poorly, it creates delays, rework, false commitments, constant expediting, and demotivated people.

The hidden cost of coordination is enormous because it looks like responsible management: meetings, priorities, escalations, follow-ups, schedule reviews, and progress updates. But excessive coordination does real damage. It forces costly tradeoffs with incomplete information, consumes managers and experts who should be applying judgment and expertise, and teaches people to wait for coordination rather than take ownership of results.

The history of modern project management can therefore be read in two ways. One story is the development of ever more sophisticated planning and scheduling tools — from the Critical Path Method to advanced algorithms and software — to help organizations deal with complexity. The other story is more troubling: despite these tools, and despite billions of dollars spent on project management systems, much of the energy of project management is still consumed by coordination and firefighting.

This essay argues that sophistication is not the answer. Au contraire. The real challenge is to design a simpler scheme that decimates the need for coordination in the first place — one that allows projects to flow with minimal management intervention, restores real management work, and uses scarce capacity to do more projects and do them faster.

This does not mean that project selection, scope, technical approach, or commercial tradeoffs are secondary. Quite the opposite. These are the decisions that determine whether projects are worth doing and whether they will succeed. They are exactly what management and expert capacity must be freed to address.

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Continue Reading: Part 2: The Case for Simplifying Project Management

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