RMS Titanic was a passenger liner that struck an iceberg on her maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York City, and sank on 15 April 1912. She struck the iceberg four days into the crossing, at 23:40 on 14 April 1912, and sank at 2:20 the following morning, resulting in the deaths of 1,517 people in one of the deadliest peacetime maritime disasters in history.
-Wikipedia

The Sinking of the Titanic on April 14/15, 1912 offers many valuable lessons for the Project Manager, from both a popular perspective and from a more serious academic perspective.

The Sinking of RMS Titanic – a Popular Perspective

Various authors have used the sinking of the Titanic to illustrate popular lessons, such as Icebergs are only 1/7th above water (hence the expression “tip of the iceberg“). Blog entry “Management Lessons from Titanic” on the Taming the Software Dragon blog lists 10 such lessons learned.

The Titanic story is well known to many people from the various movies that have been made over the past century. Wikipedia has a list of films featuring RMS Titanic, beginning in 1912 and including the 1997 film by James Cameron.

The 1997 film Titanic focused on the characters of Jack Dawson (Leondaro DiCaprio) and Rose DeWitt Bakater (Kate Winslet). The making of the movie was a massive project, with an estimated budget of $200 million. This included the building of a reconstruction of the Titanic at Playas de Rosarito, Baja California. This set, as well as the scale models and computer-generated imagery are shown in the Making of the Titanic, featured on YouTube.

Academic Studies of the Lessons Learned from RMS Titanic

If you’re willing to spend the time for a more in-depth study of the disaster, these links provide a deeper study of the Titanic disaster, from the perspectives of the design and construction of the ship, the design of the White Star ocean-crossing service, through her maiden voyage to the discovery of the wreck in 1985.

For an in-depth study of White Star and the design and construction design and construction decisions, Mark Kozak-Holland has written two books. These books are available on the Lessons From History website – Titanic Lessons for IT Projects (the first and second chapters are available for download), 160 pages and Avoiding Project Disaster: Titanic Lessons for IT Executives (Lessons from History), 312 pages. You can view a 20 minute video called Titanic – Project Management Blunders on YouTube. An interview with Mark Kozak-Holland is available online, also on YouTube.

Mark Kozak-Holland serialized much of the material on gantthead.com in a 16 part series IT Project Lessons from Titanic.

The International Journal of Project Management, in August of 2010, featured an article titled The Titanic sunk, so what? Project manager response to unexpected events.

The South Wales and West of England Association for Project Management (APM) branches organised an event in Bath and invited Mark Kozak-Holland to speak on Titanic lessons for modern projects. This article includes the applicable APM Body of Knowledge references for APM credit. Also on the APM site, you can read a review and summary of the event by Martin Gosden.

In “Project Management of the RMS Titanic and the Olympic Ships“, Alan Scott Miller examines the Titanic as a service, particularly a ferry service, to its end customers.

In “Project Management and the Discovery of the Titanic,” James Peter Murphy discusses the 1980’s project to find the wreck on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.

RMS Titanic as Metaphor

The sinking of the Titanic is often used as a metaphor for projects that were deemed ‘unsinkable’ or even ‘too big to fail’. Michael Kaplan linked the two concepts for the Huffington Post – Titanic: Too Big to Fail.

I was very amused by a post about lessons that can be learned from the titanic on Change Management. Angry Aussie uses the Titanic as metaphor for a NSFW (language) blog article on challenges with a fixed price contract and the negotiations between the Business Project Manager, the Vendor Project Manager and the Business Analyst. It’s a very entertaining read and resonated with ‘deja vu’ for me. – EdmontonPM

The PMI Virtual Library features the article Risk Determination in Highly Interactive Environments: How to Avoid the Titanic Factor in Your Project – A White Paper. In this article, Bruce Weeks examines the interactions between Risk Factors and suggests the design of a cross-consistency matrix to focus the project manager’s attention to those interactions that pose the most risk to the project.

Category C Activity: Lessons Learned from The Sinking of the Titanic

You can make these articles part of your PDU Plan and earn Category C PDUs. We have provided the educational references in this article; , you can create your own Category C learning activity. Keep track of the Project Management lessons you have learned and the time you spent on the activity.

For more information see our article which describes Category C Self-Directed Learning (SDL), the Three Learning Questions and SMART goal setting.