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Project Followership is
a recent Project Management discipline that looks at projects with a bottom up approach. While in fact the vast majority of Project Management publications are targeted to Project Managers, Project Followership considers team members as the key actors. Project Followership is not antagonist to Project Management but it is complimentary.
Origin
The first time that the term Project Followership has been used in a public and written format can be dated back to 1992. To be noted that authors reported followership in brackets.
In the academic environment the term project followership can be first found at the Johns Hopkins University, School of Nursing, as a topic listed in the course catalog for the academic year 2009-2010.
Another reference can be found at the Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, where professor Smulders lists Project Followership as a topic presented during lectures and as a coaching activity.
The first public written contribution completely dedicated to the project followership subject can be considered the italian book Partecipare a un progetto (Participating in a project), ETAS 2010 .
Motivation
Project management is a relatively young discipline (barely 70 years old) which is constantly evolving and has a growing popularity. As a consequence, a large number of publications on the subject are available.
The state of the art of the subject can be summarized as follow: strong presence of publications on the general aspects of project management; good presence of articles on particular methodological or organizational aspects, such as project leadership; verticalization on sectors such information systems or construction; few books and articles about neighboring disciplines such as project portfolio management, program management, or multi-project management.
Almost all the publications are centered around the project manager. The team is always seen from a top-down point of view: the project manager must select the team, he/she must coordinate it, motivate it, deal with internal conflicts, etc.
If one looks at the discipline of project management from collaborators’ perspective, not from the coordinators one, nothing suitable can be found. In fact, nobody has so far dealt with project management taking into account the knowledge, skills, and behaviors that a collaborator must have to participate in a project as team member. Hence the idea of looking at project management bottom-up, in order to supply collaborators with useful knowledge in order to perform their tasks well.
By citing one of the author of the first Project Followership publication : “Too often projects are passively accepted rather than actively participated in.
The issue is not that the birth of the project is not shared, but mostly that many people feel lost, since they don’t have the right knowledge to understand the dynamics of the project. So project meetings are often turned into failed affairs where irrelevant questions are posed (and this decreases participation and increases conflicts), the kick-off meeting is considered a waste of time where you can get free sandwiches, and planning meetings become technical summits where everybody speaks in impenetrable jargon, creating mutual dissatisfaction.”
Reinterpreting the project according to a bottom-up logic seeks to address these problems by equipping each participant with right tools.
Development
Beside the incidental use of the term Project Followership, major developements can be seen starting from 2010. In fact, in 2010 the first dedicated publication appeared, some training provider added project followership in its offer , and in February 2011 the topic has been presented at the NASA Project Management Challenge.