The biggest myth of Project Management
The magic triangle
You cannot finish a project without three main skills:
- Problem solving
- Negotiation
- Project management
These skills are the basis of being successful in whatever you’re trying to accomplish. They are included in any activity you do in your life. Your new shiny startup, renovation of your grandma’s house and, for sure, your daily life.
Everyone manages projects but not everyone does it well enough. Hopefully, it is not that hard to learn.
In the next articles I’ll explain the meaning of these skills. However, before going into business, let’s think about meaning of a “project”.
Everything is a project
First of all, project is basically any task you do in your (daily) life. Project is not necessarily a business. Getting your child ready to school is a project, doing groceries for a week is a project, travelling to your dream destination is also a project.
Even making a good dinner for your date is a small project on its own. Let’s take it as an example. First of all, you need to negotiate with her/him what would she/he like to eat, at what day and where. And, most importantly, agree on something you can cook well. Then you would need to get the right ingredients, properly prepare all of them and make something tasty out of it. A. k. a. solve the problem. During the whole process, you need to carefully manage your time and resources to make sure that (a) you have enough time to cook whatever you’ve agreed on (b) you got fresh ingredients in the right proportions (c) you have a backup plan in case if your old oven will break again and (d) you are not late.
From A to B
Everyone thinks that doing a project is a simply going from A to B.
However, as soon as you start, you will realise that everything goes the wrong way. Every time and each time different issues appear. In reality, the project never goes smooth.
Let’s again take a date as an example. Imagine, you’re having dinner. And you have agreed on a good meaty steak with potatoes and a small desert. You’ve made these steaks a thousand times before, what could possibly go wrong? Your butcher didn’t have the fresh meat today, you forgot to get the potatoes, the neighbour flooded your apartment, your oven broke, you’ve accidentally dropped the cake, the date is allergic to the sauce and a thousand other reasons.
Some issues you would be able to predict, some will appear to your surprise. You don’t need to be prepared for every possible case. But you need to make sure that when something goes wrong, you have enough resources and enough time to fix the issue without affecting the quality of the job you make.
That leads us to the next important principle.
Law of losses
It is impossible to finish a project in time, in budget, with the highest quality and with all the planned features. Eventually, you will need to sacrifice something to get the project done.
To be continued in the next article…
Thanks for reading my first article, feel free to comment and follow me to get updates as soon as they are published ;-)
Disclaimer: everything written above is a freewill translation of “Managing projects, people and yourself” course extended with my own experience. The course is taught in Moscow by Art Gorbunov school. Special thanks to the main lecturer, Nikolay Toverovsky, for allowing me to translate and publish these materials.
