In its earliest uses (documented in the 15th century), context meant “the weaving together of words in language.” This sense, now obsolete, developed logically from the word’s source in Latin, contexere “to weave or join together.” Context now most commonly refers to the environment or setting in which something (whether words or events) exists. When we say that something is contextualized, we mean that it is placed in an appropriate setting, one in which it may be properly considered (Merriam-Webster dictionary).
People are driven by context – When your spouse is asking you to drive the kids to the city, you react differently then if a you get the same request from a bloodied bully, who suddenly opens your car’s door, while pushing a half-dressed kid inside.
Project management exists within a certain context – You have real-estate project managers and software project manager, and if you sit them together you’ll see that although they deal with the same problems, there is hardly any transitivity in skills. You don’t see software project managers applying for job in the building industry and vice versa.
This specificity is common in various fields that require training and domain language. If you train for a marathon, fit as you are, you’ll seldom be considered fit, if required to swim a mile in competitive time. Similarly, jargon that is developed in one “tribal” domain, may have totally different meaning in another. Take for example IM acronym that means Incident Management in the Infosec tribe and Instant Messaging in the software development tribe.
PMI’s PMBOK is a nice try in distilling the common knowledge required for Project management, however, reading a general car repair manual, will not make a mechanic, besides the metadata, you need to have specific documentation for the car’s model as well as tools of the trade, and a good amount of grease.
The real question I’m pondering with, is whether there can be a General Project Manager position, similarly to the general management profession for which various CEOs usually get nice compensation due to their effort. Or being tactical in nature, Project management discipline require you to chose whether to be a marathon runner or a swimmer.
This question can be answered when examining CEOs that actually shift between industries. Those individuals have two attributes in common. The first is: They got the talent. You usually have to be above average player to get to this position, unless your daddy owns the company. And the second attribute, is that that those that jump between the industries are actually experts’ decision makers in money management, or people management, and thus disconnected themselves from domain specific constraints and jargon.
The bottom line is that you can be a General Project Manager (GPM), provided you’re overly talented and dealing with projects that are big enough to isolate your decision making to people behavior and money. But of you are competent enough to play this field, why not call yourself a CEO and get better pay grade?
