Project management guidelines in 300 words
08:56, 29 June 2010
.. Posted in Communication, Outreach and General Mngmt.. Link
In the course of going through and scanning photos and postcards from my grandfather's time in the US Army in WWII, I found a small pamphlet, about the size of a photo, that was designed to fit in the pocket or a wallet of a soldier. I had a good laugh over it; it's the Army's effort to teach the basics of project management in about 300 words to all soldiers. My grandfather must have found it amusing too; he wrote at the top, "If you are in the field you need this ha ha."
It opens with "The Commanding General desires that each officer and enlisted man in this Corps learn and carry out the following procedure in training as in war". Can you imagine someone in a crisis situation saying, "Wait! Wait! Stop shooting! I've got to check my field guidelines."
And yet, there's something beautifully simplistic about it, something that gets right to the heart of managing people and getting something done. "To help me THINK rapidly, clearly and logically under stress, each situation presented to me will be thought out about as follows:" And then it offers 10 steps to manage the situation, in two parts, with a final recommendation regarding the importance of timely reporting. Isn't that what the essence of successful project management is?
So, my grandfather learned project management in the US Army. I learned it in two high-stress, deadline driven environments: first newspapers, then theater. No book I've read or class I've taken has been as good as the training I got from newspapers or theater in learning how to break down a project or objective quickly into tasks to be completed, with realistic timelines, by a team of people, how to keep up-to-date on what each team member is doing, how to quickly address problems as they arise, and how to meet that final deadline.
Wikipedia has a very descent page listing project management software. I've been fiddling about with OpenProj, but I haven't liked it as much as the project management database I created myself on an old version of Filemaker Pro, which I lost when I had to upgrade my computer and operating system. If you use a project management software that can be used on a Mac operating system (and is cross-platform), talk about it here.
