As usual, Seth Godin recently posted a powerful 300-word blog post, and this one struck home for me:

If you choose to manage a project, it’s pretty safe. As the manager, you report. You report on what’s happening, you chronicle the results, you are the middleman.

If you choose to run a project, on the other hand, you’re on the hook. It’s an active engagement, bending the status quo to your will, ensuring that you ship.

In the not-so-distant past, I was developer on a project that had lots of people that wanted to manage it, but no one that would run it. There was even a venerable PMP on the project, but alas this person was only interested in tracking timelines — not in owning anything or getting to the root of why dates kept slipping.

The project could nearly be a Harvard case study in why large corporations fail to develop software quickly. In large corporations, people have very specific roles to play and they are there to guard their kingdoms. So if a project spans multiple kingdoms, you need someone to keep all of those kingdoms in line. In the words of Seth Godin, you need an owner — someone to kick butt and take names when you’re project starts to slip.

Sadly, when a project goes bad, most strive not to own it! And when it goes real bad, they bring in even more kingdoms for yet more approval with complete ignorance to the classic Brook’s Law that adding more people to a late project only makes it later…

It leaves me only to wonder, how soon could the project have shipped if someone would have truly owned it from the beginning?