Management, as a discipline, has a problem it can”t solve. It needs to coordinate separate but related activities caused by the division of labour. And it needs to be able to do this regardless of how labour is divided.
Project management, in particular, has this problem. I’ve said before that project management is a perfectly reasonable discipline as long as it doesn’t try to cross organisational boundaries. This is why project management is necessary but not sufficient in managing outsourcing.
Likewise, program management – which the discipline likes to define as the management of multiple related projects – isn’t really a separate discipline because of the scale of the work or the number of projects, it’s a separate discipline because multiple projects have multiple project managers.
Unfortunately, the accepted tenets of management simply do not scale. Multiple managers causes more problems than they solve – and therefore situations which require multiple managers need other practices to govern them.
The root of this problem is that ultimately, the discipline of management doesn’t in itself offer any useful advice on how to divide labour. It takes it as a given that labour is divided and then attempts to coordinate that.
Equally, managers – when you switch them on and give them responsibilities – tend to manage to those responsibilities. Good so far, but if the division of responsibilities isn’t right there is a problem. The problem might even get bigger if the managers are better.
But there are right and wrong ways to divide labour. Some activities are autonomous and some aren’t. Dividing management responsibilities and activities has its own additional challenges.
Only ‘architecture’ (which I define in this context as deliniated shared understanding) can offer any help in the actual division of labour. However, architecture must be domain specific. In order to determine correct/incorrect or efficient/inefficient divisions of labour it must take into account the domain and the required outcome.
(by the way, if you think a ‘strong management team’ solves this problem check out my article on ‘Management Teams as Cartels’)