Friday, March 20, 2020

Using Project Management for ALL Work

Imet Alan Mulally when he was CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, and he told me that they didn’t differentiate very much between general management and project management (PM). The reason is quite simple. Those of us who use PM know that we didn’t invent a single tool commonly used. All of them were developed to control manufacturing operations. In other words, all the tools of PM were developed to manage work, so it is the only discipline designed expressly for that purpose.
Which leads to the main point of this article — you should consider using the tools of PM for all work that you do, whether it be mundane or executive. For example, every strategic initiative that an executive manages can be planned, scheduled, and controlled using PM methods.
The basic tools are Work Breakdown Structures, which show all of the smaller tasks that must be performed to do a larger job. Schedules like Critical Path Method to work out what can be done in parallel with other tasks in order to shorten the total time it will take to complete a job. Next is Earned Value Analysis to assess the amount of work that has been completed compared to the planned amount. And then there is Risk Analysis and management using FMEA (Failure Mode Effect Analysis), which came from engineering to determine if a design is going to be suitable for field use.
If you’re unfamiliar with these tools, there are a lot of books that explain them. My Project Planning, Scheduling and Control, 5th Edition is one. The point is to pick and choose which ones you need for a specific job. A strategic initiative may not need a schedule, but simply a to-do list. Keep it simple.