What They Don't Tell You in Training…
Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at andy.jordan@roffensian.com. Andy’s new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.
I have no issues with project management training. In fact, in the past I have been a trainer. However, as a new project manager, you need to understand that the projects you will be managing are nothing like the exercises you undertook on those courses. The real world is far more complex and far less predictable than those exercises, and you don’t have the luxury of focusing on just one problem at a time.
Here’s my attempt at helping you learn how to apply the concepts from those courses to the project’s you will face. There’s no substitute for experience, but hopefully that experience will be a little less painful if you are expecting some of the challenges.
1. No one else took the course. The first point to make is an obvious one, but it’s something that gets forgotten. The people who are working with you on the project didn’t take the project management course, so they aren’t going to behave in the same way as the exercises from that course.
That doesn’t mean the theories from training don’t apply, it simply means you have to learn and adjust. In real projects, the team members and stakeholders will behave differently from one another and from the “perfect” team members in the example. They’ll make mistakes, they’ll have different priorities from each other, they’ll rush tasks or …
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Published at Wed, 25 Jul 2018 04:00:00 +0000
