Everyone s a Project Manager

Everyone's a Project Manager

In the broadest terms, every person in your organization has at one time or another been faced with the job of planning and executing some sort of project. It might have been a simple thing like organizing a family picnic or something quite complex like developing a software application for one of your departments. Even though these two projects seem worlds apart in importance, objectives, and resource requirements, they have a great deal in common in terms of the planning and overseeing that will make them successes. (Since far more family picnics occur on schedule than software product launches, we might want to withhold judgment about which of the project managers involved has the most savvy!)

According to the 2000 PMBOK Guide, a project is ‚“A temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product or service ‚½ (page 4). I think you ‚ ll agree that both putting together the family picnic and developing the software product qualify as projects. In fact, a good portion of our time at home and at work is devoted to projects. We may not always be in charge of every undertaking, but we very often wind up in supervisory or management roles in at least a few of them. Thus, whether we know it or not, we are already project managers. We ‚ ve probably had some successes in these projects of which we are proud. In other cases, we may have an uneasy feeling that there might have been a better way to get the work done. It was this same vague uneasiness that eventually led to the development of project management as a discipline. It ‚ s always gratifying to see participants in project management training have their first ‚“Aha! ‚½ experience when they encounter a tool or technique that they see will help them avoid repeating some painful experience they ‚ ve had in past projects.