Why Project Management Is Killing the Actual Work

Bin the project governance theatre. Abandon the illusion of certainty. Let people build the bridge.

Photo by Europeana on Unsplash

Here’s why. I look around the train carriage. Earbuds in. Laptops open. Half of them are on Teams calls about “the project.” Same thing at the coworking space. Stand-ups. Check-ins. Steering groups. “Quick syncs” that are neither quick nor synchronising anything.

Here’s what’s happening: organisations are quietly turning ordinary, ongoing work into projects. Routine stuff. BAU. The kind of work that used to just… get done.
Now it gets a charter, a RAID log, a RAG status, a costly PMO, and a weekly cadence of meetings where adults explain to other adults what they did last week and what they plan to do next week. Not that most of them are interested.

And nobody seems to be asking the obvious question: why?

The answer is governance theatre. The illusion of control. If we wrap the work in enough process, enough reporting, enough oversight, we can pretend we’ve reduced uncertainty. We haven’t. We’ve just added dumb meetings, bored everyone and made delivery less likely.

Here’s what makes it absurd. Go and look at a real project. The construction of a bridge, say. Thousands of moving parts. Genuine complexity. Safety-critical. And yet the entire workforce does not spend half its day in project meetings.

The coordination layer exists, yes — scheduling, sequencing, resource allocation — but it sits above the work. The people actually building the bridge carry on largely oblivious to it. That’s the whole point. The coordination serves the work. It doesn’t consume it.

Now compare that to most corporate “projects.” The people doing the work are the people in the meetings. They’re not being coordinated. They’re being supervised, narrated, and status-reported into the ground. They spend more time forced to talk about the work than doing it. Then someone wonders why productivity is poor: Time for another status update.

This is what happens when organisations confuse activity with progress. When they mistake reporting for rigour. When they reach for more governance instead of more trust.

Let’s stop turning ordinary work into “projects”. Stop asking people to narrate their own work back to you in weekly increments, like a school report. Give people clarity on what matters, then give them the autonomy and space to do the actual work. Crazy idea, I know.

The next time you’re stuck in a coma-inducing project update, maybe ask: isn’t this just work? Why are we pretending it’s a project?