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.
- 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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