3/27/2015

A Project By Any Other Name


In 1981, I graduate from the Babcock School of Management at Wake Forest University located in Winston-Salem, NC with an MBA degree. 

It was a difficult course of study for me because my undergraduate degree was English. 

My pursuit of this degree was brought about by my position as Executive Director of a Non-Profit and not having any management skills or training.

My MBA course focused on Small Business Management and Strategic Planning, all of which was wrapped around a concept referred to as “Product Management.” Simply put, I was being trained to enter the workforce of a large company and manage a product line.

In those days, if you were a trained Product Manager then you were on a fast track to upper management within a few short years, positioning you to possibly be groomed to become CEO one day in the near future.

But alas, that was not my desire... I just wanted to manage my little non-profit and what I did not realize at the time was that I had been trained to be a “professional manager,” and had the skill sets to manage any organization at all.

Over the years, Product Management changed to Project Management and I soon realized that my previous employments had provided me with over 13,000 hours of actual project management experience as a leader of projects.

Shortly thereafter, I joined the faculty of ITT Technical Institute and was selected because of my education and experience to be a course writer in the area of Technical Project Management and began working with Pearson and Wiley Publishing along with NIIT in New Delhi, India to write these online and onsite courses.

I also became a member of the local PMI (Project Management Institute) group and soon learned about the PMP (Project Management Professional) Certification. It was simply part of what I had learned in my MBA program years earlier and it was then that I made the connection.

The more I looked in project management being a course writer, the more I realized as well that EVERYTHING that goes on in business as well as in our personal lives can be seen and managed like a project.

Planning and preparing for Thanksgiving or Christmas is a project.
  • Getting married is a project.
  • Going on vacation is a project.
  • A semester at College is a project.
  • Teaching a course is a project.
  • Playing a game in any professional sport is a project.
  • Military Boot Camp is a project.
  • Deploying troops overseas is a project.
  • A political election is a project.

And, this list goes on and on and on.

So, what is a project?
It is an activity that has a beginning and an end with processes and systems that operate so that the right output, result, or conclusion is achieved in a timely, effective, and efficient manner.

Projects can have Charters and Sponsors.

Some projects can be on-going, incorporating sub-projects within its boundaries like the publishing of a monthly magazine or daily newspaper.

Projects could be designed to look at other projects and reduce the amount of time it takes for those projects to reach completion. For instance, a new product development project that in the past might have 12 months to complete, now only takes 6-9 months to complete because another project team was Chartered to improve the process.

All projects have life cycles, even those that last for a day as well as those that may last over a year.
  • projects are initiated where the need for that project has been realized.
  • projects have periods of upfront planning.
  • projects commence or roll out as some might say.
  • projects are monitored and controlled by a Project Leader
  • projects conclude, end, or are turned over to a maintaining team.

As you can now imagine, there are many activities going on in your life that are operating as a project that you had no idea were in fact a project. And, all these projects will continue to operated the way they have always operated even though you have this new knowledge.

PMP Certifications are valuable but not always necessary in managing a project. In order to be eligible to sit for the PMP certification exam, you must so many hours of previous project management experience as a team leader. The exam itself tests one's ability at understanding and of course memorizing the PMBOK which is Project Management Body of Knowledge.

The PMP Certification is a good ticket to have and will certainly put you in a position to qualify for receiving a substantial salary increase, but it is not necessary to actually manage or learn to manage a project ALL WORK takes place in the form of a project.

And, while that sounds simple and it really is, there are some other pieces of knowledge that will be helpful for you to know when managing projects that I will share with you in future articles.




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