What if project management education started before the workplace?

“This workshop you’re proposing to run for the students, how do you think it would have benefited you when you were a student here?”

My former ICT teacher asked me that question after I had come out of prison, started a foundation focused on preventing the derailment of young people and returned to my old college to begin that work.

It was a simple question, but it has stayed with me for more than ten years.

Whenever we have developed a new programme or initiative through Rytrack Foundation, I have found myself returning to it: would this have helped me earlier?

Years later, when I encountered agile ways of working professionally, the same question came back.

Project management is usually introduced at university, through professional training or once somebody enters the workplace. By then, however, many young people have already spent years trying to manage education, relationships, ambitions, risks and major life transitions, often without a unified and transferable structure for planning, reviewing and adapting across these different areas of life.

Schools, families and youth organisations already provide many forms of structure, but these are often designed around particular subjects, services or moments in a young person's development. What interests me is whether selected project management practices could provide a common framework that young people can learn to carry between them.

Derailment can happen quietly

I have become increasingly interested in what I describe as derailment — and its sibling, alignment.

During adolescence, subtle and not-so-subtle forces continually act upon a developing young person: their peer group, family circumstances, educational experiences, opportunities, neighbourhood, finances, relationships and the decisions they make.

Some of these become risk factors while others become protective factors.

Individually, they may seem insignificant. Collectively, and over time, they can influence whether someone becomes increasingly aligned with education, employment and positive development, or progressively moves away from them.

Looking back at my own adolescence, I am repeatedly struck by how differently I understood situations only six months, three years or ten years later. Development gives us perspective retrospectively. The challenge is that many consequential decisions have already been made by the time that perspective arrives.

This is where I began wondering whether some of the practices we routinely use to manage organisational complexity could have value much earlier in life.

What project management taught me about visibility

In my professional work across PMO, programme delivery and agile transformation, one of the most useful things we do is deceptively simple: we make work visible.

A Kanban board does not magically solve a problem but once work, dependencies, blockers and priorities become visible, patterns that were previously hidden can become easier to recognise.

That made me ask another question: When else in life would it be valuable to make invisible patterns visible?

For an adolescent, imagine being able to see in one place:

what they want to achieve;
what they are currently working on;
what is blocking them;
who they need support from;
what risks are emerging;
what has repeatedly failed;
and what progress they have already made.

The terminology does not matter. I’m not suggesting that 13-year-olds need lessons in corporate governance or programme management jargon.

The underlying behaviours are what interest me.

When else might it be useful to learn how to:

define an outcome;
break a goal into manageable actions;
prioritise;
identify risks;
recognise dependencies;
visualise progress;
review what happened;
learn from setbacks;
adapt a plan; and
ask whether the intended benefit was actually achieved?

These are ordinary project management behaviours yet they are also remarkably close to the behaviours required to navigate life.

From managing projects to managing development

This raises an uncomfortable question for our profession.

If these capabilities are sufficiently valuable that organisations invest billions in helping adults develop them, why do we largely wait until adulthood to introduce them?

Perhaps elements of project management have applications beyond delivering construction projects, digital products or organisational transformations. Perhaps they can also contribute to human development. However, this is not to suggest that project management can resolve structural disadvantages, or that workplace practices can simply be transplanted into adolescence; they would need careful adaptation and evaluation.

Over the coming year, through my MSc in Programme and Project Management at the University of Warwick, one of the questions I intend to explore is: Can selected project management and agile practices improve life-management capability, wellbeing and developmental outcomes among adolescents?

The answer may be yes. It may be no. More likely, we may discover that some practices are useful, some are irrelevant and others need substantial adaptation but that is precisely why I think it is worth testing.

After more than a decade asking whether the interventions we create for young people would have helped me when I needed them, project management has given me a new version of that original question: What might change if we taught some of the tools we use to manage complex projects before young people had to manage the most complex project they will ever encounter; their own lives.