PMcrunch

Deciding takes some muscle. Developing those muscles takes practice – and the right kind of practice. Making decisions is tough, and when I think about it, a couple of things stand out as all important to me – and one is PRIORITIZATION.

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One of the most profound and ubiquitous management concepts over the past 30 years is “systems thinking”. Systems thinking is all around us. One example is that project management has in essence been “systematized” by the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) Guide!

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What do Six Sigma, ITIL, and Project Management have in common? These three disciplines all have associated business certifications, living largely in the ‘business’ versus technical realm, and all relate in some way to processes. But how can these disciplines relate to one another in such a way that greater value is created for the individual as well as the organization?

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Often it is hard to decide to what to do first, or what to do next. In fact, in my experience, it is often easier to make such decisions on large projects than smaller projects. The Theory of Constraints is a neat concept that can help.

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Managing becomes so much easier when you build a foundation for what you are managing. In essence, this means getting intimate with the requirements, as well as the needs of the stakeholders. Stakeholder management and familiarity with requirements rank about as high as it gets as determinants of project success. The reason is simple: they form the basis upon which everything else is built. Building a strong foundation in these areas makes it easy to take any next steps toward managing the project.

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Oftentimes, as[tag-dir]project managers[/tag-dir] and leaders, we are called upon to compare a variety of potential solutions and to either recommend or choose the best one for our situation. There are a variety of ways to do this. It is important for us to recognize that the answer we come up with is very closely related to the questions we ask and how we do the comparison. Many times—perhaps even most of the time—we do this comparisons in a relatively informal way, putting together our own structure. In other cases however, there is a much formalized organizational structure with a formal name such as [/tag-tec]“analysis of alternatives”[tag-dir] that is performed.

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As [tag-tec]project managers[/tag-tec], we are often called upon to present choices to our [tag-dir]stake holders[/tag-dir]We are often called upon to present options for solutions, scenarios, and items for discussions, priorities and more. There is a well proven rule that when it comes to choices, less is better.

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I just heard a discussion led by a Duke University economics professor (sorry, I didn’t get his name) who had some interesting points to make about things being for free or being for money. He draws some very interesting conclusions that might be helpful to many of us on our projects.

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[tag-tec]Gold plating[/tag-tec], or the idea of delivering more or better than requested is generally not accepted in [tag-dir]project management[/tag-dir] doctrine. However, I think we need to take this with a grain of salt and consider how to discern when and how we might over deliver.

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I recently read a foreign post where somebody asked if project management was good preparation for the job of CEO. There were a variety of comments most of which I find somewhat discouraging saying that, [tag-tec]project management[/tag-tec] was inadequate preparation for a CEO position and that CEO positions involve a lot of different skills. While arguably these things are true, I think that we can take a positive take on that question and ask “What would differentiate a project manager who might on the CEO track from one who is not?”

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