Practical Project Managementby Brian Tracy
Some skills are peripheral to success. It’s nice to have them, but they don’t make much of a difference one way or another. There are other skills, however, that are absolutely essential to your fulfilling your potential, and you must develop them to a fairly high degree if you are to achieve all of your goals. One of these absolutely essential skills is the ability to manage projects of various sizes. A project is defined as a multitask job, the kind that you engage in every day in the process of making a living and carrying on the business of your life. To be a success, you must be good at project management. One of the great dangers in project management is feeling that we already know all we need to know about the subject. Too many people take their ability to do several jobs at once, or in a row, for granted. They fall into the intelligence trap of the low performer. They use their intelligence to point out to themselves and to others how confident and capable they already are. They join the ranks of the “unconscious incompetent.” The unconscious incompetent is the person who does not know, and he does not know that he does not know. Project management is a function not just of those who build hydroelectric dams or construct huge skyscrapers. You organize and engage in a project each time you go shopping at the grocery store. If you are in sales, every prospect you are working on developing into a regular customer is a project. If you are going out for the evening with another person, you are planning and organizing a project. And here is a key point. Your ability to organize and carry through a project successfully is a key skill for success. It is the essential art of management. It is the way that you multiply yourself and your results. Your ability to manage projects of all kinds is absolutely indispensable to your achieving financial independence and moving to the top in your field. Many people can type, but few people can type 80 or 90 words a minute without mistakes. Millions of people know how to operate computers, but only a few can use the computer so skillfully as to maximize its capacities in helping them to do their work and accomplish their objectives. Many people can sell, but the top 10 percent of salespeople still open 80 percent of the new accounts and make most of the money. Project management is similar. Everyone knows how to carry out a multitask job. But few people are good at it. Most are partially organized and partially disorganized. They spend too much time, too much money, and they make too many mistakes in getting from Point A to Point B. They don’t manage the projects in their lives skillfully because they don’t know how critical this ability is to accomplishing virtually everything else they could possibly want in life. To succeed in life, you need leverage; you need assistance. If you want to achieve big things, and live a great life, you need the help of lots of people. You need to be very good at coordinating the activities of several people in a single direction toward a predetermined objective. If you don’t develop your skills at project management, you will still be involved in projects, but you will always be a team member and never be a team leader. The economic strength of America is due to many things, and one of the most important is specialization of tasks, or division of labor. This simply means that most people, instead of trying to be jacks-of-all-trades, specialize and become very good at doing one or two things. Today, one of the most popular words in American business is outsourcing. This means that, instead of hiring or building a capability in-house, you delegate an entire function of your company to another company that specializes in doing only that one task. Many people are finding that it is cheaper to have functions such as payroll, accounting, drop-shipping, manufacturing, assembly, delivery and distribution, plus a thousand other tasks, done by other companies that specialize in those areas than it is to do them in-house. Your whole life is a process of outsourcing. Whether you are aware of it or not, you are continually outsourcing tasks and activities to a hundred other enterprises, such as grocery stores, restaurants, dry cleaners, quick-oil-change franchises and tailors. You don’t bother to learn how to do those things yourself. It is much faster and cheaper for you to turn the tasks over to people who specialize in them. They can do the tasks faster, better and with fewer mistakes than you ever could imagine. By outsourcing, you free up your time to do more and more of the things that you do best and for which you are the highest paid. It is one of the keys to developing the leverage that turns you into a multiplication sign with your talents and abilities. In project management, you engage in a systematic and well-organized process of outsourcing the various tasks that need to be done to achieve a particular objective. You develop synergy by pulling together the talents and abilities of a lot of people toward the accomplishment of a single goal. By working together as a team, a group of people with different talents can accomplish extraordinary things. And your ability to get all members of a team pulling in the same direction is the key to your maximizing yourself in your life and in your career. To unleash the cooperative capabilities of a team of people toward the achievement of a multitask job, the operative word should be harmony. One of the most important things you can do is to strive for harmony among the people working with you and for you. Project management is an art. It requires thought. Whenever you have a large job to do, your very first step is to sit down with a pad of paper and begin to “think on paper.” All highly successful men and women think on paper. They write things down before they begin. They make lists, and they make sublists. They use calculators. And they analyze every detail of a large project before they begin. They think it through from beginning to end. And in so doing, they save enormous amounts of time and money, and they seem to get more done in a few months than the average person gets done in years. Project management takes practice, as does anything else. It requires self-discipline. It requires the willpower to hold yourself back from plunging into a task before thinking it through in advance. Many people are in a “reactive-responsive” mode. They react to whatever is happening around them, and they respond to however they feel at the moment. They leap into things, and then they leap out. They rush to make judgments, come to decisions and take actions without bothering to analyze the situation thoroughly. They make enormous numbers of mistakes and are seen by others as incompetent and disorganized. Don’t be one of those people. When you decide to become excellent at project management, you begin to apply a systematic process such as the one I will describe. Your ability to achieve multitask jobs is to control everything else you accomplish. And it’s not that difficult to learn. In any project, the first thing to do is start at the goal and work back. Stephen Covey says, “Begin with the end in mind.” Dr. Roberto Assagioli suggests that you begin all activities by creating the ideal result or outcome that you desire, either on paper or in your mind, before you proceed to planning and organizing. Robert Fritz, in his book The Path of Least Resistance, says that the most powerful of all organizing principles is a future vision of a clear goal to which you, and others, are committed. In his research on peak performers, Dr. Charles Garfield found that a person’s ability to project his mind forward to the desired end state, to the goal as if it were already achieved, the task as though it were completed perfectly in every respect, is the starting point of maximum achievement. In any case, every project begins with your clearly defining exactly what you want to accomplish and what it will look like if it is accomplished perfectly. For example, let’s say that you decide to take a two-week trip to the Caribbean next winter. This is a project. You begin by defining what an ideal Caribbean vacation would consist of in every detail. You think about the hotel, the beaches, the daytime and evening activities you enjoy, the kind of people and service you want to experience and, of course, your budget. With all of those ingredients, and perhaps more, in mind, you come up with a clear description of the perfect winter holiday in the sun. You then make a list of everything that you will have to do in order to achieve that final goal. You investigate the various Caribbean islands you could visit. You call more than one travel agent, to find out if there are particular packages, including airfare and hotels, that you can purchase at excellent prices well in advance. You plan your budget and determine where and when you will get the money that you require for this trip. You consider your work responsibilities and think through how you will arrange being away for two weeks without your company or your clients suffering at the time. If you have children, you think through their requirements, whether they will come with you or stay with someone while you are away. If you have animals, you think about how they will be taken care of. You think about the various clothes and accessories that you will need for a two-week Caribbean vacation. Once you have determined exactly how you want the goal to look when it is complete, you set specific dates and deadlines, starting from the departure date back to the present. By doing this, you have a clear time line from where you are to where you need to be on the day that the plane takes off. The next step in project management is to organize your list of all the things that will need to be done for you to get to your goal, the completion of your project. There are two ways to organize a list in project management. The first way is sequential. This is when one step follows another. The first must be done before the second can be started. The second must be completed before the third can be started, and so on. These are often called dependent activities. One depends on the successful completion of another. This is a key point to remember in managing a project of any size. The second type of activities in project management are parallel or concurrent activities. These are tasks that can be worked on at the same time, separate and apart from other activities. For example, if you are planning a new brochure or newsletter, you could be writing the copy at the same time you are selecting paper stock or gathering possible photographs to illustrate the content. Once you have the goal in mind and have listed everything that you must do to achieve the goal, and organized everything in terms of whether it is sequential or concurrent, you are ready for the core exercise of effective project management. It is the key to your future in the world of work. It is the process of selection and delegation. The bigger the project, the more people, the more specialists in different fields, will be required to carry it through to successful completion. Your ability to select the right people and then to delegate effectively to them will determine, as much as any other factor, your success or failure. A mistake in selection or a miscommunication in delegation can be enough to derail the entire project or to set it back, or to have it run over budget. Many men and women have been able to shoot ahead in their careers by taking on a project and then performing in an exemplary fashion. Others have found themselves bypassed for promotion because when they were given a project to carry out, they did not take it seriously enough, and their lack of results undermined the confidence of their superiors in their abilities. Project management is serious stuff. Almost all problems in business are management problems, and this means project-management problems. This is often why a new manager comes in and replaces everyone on the team. He recognizes that the reason why the job isn’t getting done is probably because the person in charge of the multitask job, manufacturing, sales, distribution, or whatever, is not up to par. When you build your team, you make a statement about your capability as a manager. As much as 95 percent of your success in the business world will be determined by your ability to select the right people to help you. Most of your problems in business come from attempting to get the job done with difficult, incompetent people. Your job is to select the very best people available to you who can do the job. Examine a person’s track record carefully. Check references. Talk to other people about the task, and get opinions concerning the individual’s ability to do it in an excellent fashion. Be careful about your choices, and be adamant about assigning key tasks to the very best people. This will save you time and trouble. Once you have selected the individuals to carry out the specific parts of the project, you must delegate effectively to each of them. Assign specific responsibilities for each task necessary to complete the project to specific individuals, each of whom has a deadline as well. Tell each person what is to be done, when it is to be done, what standards of performance you require and what the overall project will look like when it is complete. Leave nothing to chance. The more people know about the what and why of the total job, the more capable they are of carrying out their individual functions. Lack of clarity is the single greatest contributor to failure in project management. For this reason, it is important that you meet regularly with the members of your team, either individually or together. You keep in touch with them on a regular basis. You keep them informed. You give, and receive, feedback. And the more important the project is, the more you stay on top of it. Just as it is important for you to think on paper in organizing a project for yourself, it is helpful for you to use a chalkboard or a flip chart when you are meeting with the members of your team. The more visual you can make the project, and the process of achieving the goal, the more likely it is that each task will be completed on schedule and to the standards you have set. You supervise the project by measuring people’s progress toward their individual deadlines. Your supervision of the project is what makes it all come together. The rule is “Inspect what you expect.” Never assume anything. Remember, Murphy’s Laws were developed by men and women managing projects of various sizes. You know some of these laws: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. However much you budget, it will cost more than you expect. However long you allow, it will take longer than you thought. Of all the things that can go wrong, the worst possible thing will go wrong at the worst possible time. And, of course, you’ve heard the corollary to Murphy’s Laws: Murphy was an optimist. Finally, in project management there is always a critical event or limiting step. This is the one thing that absolutely, positively has to be done to a set standard for the project to be successful. It is in this area that you must take personal responsibility and focus your personal attention on making sure that everything is done right. Keep your eyes on the ball, even if you delegate or outsource the task. You can use project management to develop a new account, to increase your income, to attain a high level of physical health and fitness, to plan a vacation, to move across the country, to start and build a business, to write a book, paint a picture or sail a catamaran around the world. In every case, the proper use of project-management techniques, such as those we have discussed here, can give you the winning edge. It can enable you to kick in the afterburners for your life and your career. The skill of project management will enable you to move ahead further and faster than you ever could without it. Although the steps to project management are simple, the skill of project management is complex, and it is vital to your success. The cumulative results of your developing the skills of project management will enable you to accomplish bigger and bigger tasks with greater responsibilities and greater income, with greater rewards of all kinds. Project management is a powerful key to the future. Brian Tracy is one of the world's leading authorities on practical project management. He teaches both personal and business success principles. His fast-moving talks and seminars are loaded with powerful, proven ideas and strategies that you can apply immediately to get better results in every area of your life. You can visit Brian Tracy's website here. Also take advantage of the FREE offer for Brian's CD - 21 Success Secrets of Self Made Millionaires. I've gotten tons of quality tips from it. Copyright © Brian Tracy All rights reserved worldwide. Click here to increase your project management skills.
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