by Gilda Bonanno LLC www.gildabonanno.com
If you’re
a successful project manager, you have crucial skills that not every else has:
time, cost and scope management, planning, scheduling, risk identification and
mitigation, etc. These skills are not
just useful for managing projects at work - you can apply the same skills and
techniques to manage your own life and career.
Before
starting my own business as a speaker, trainer and coach, I worked as a project
manager and I earned my PMP (Project Manager Practitioner) certification. I
managed many re-engineering projects, and there were two things that I used as
my not-so-secret weapons: Gantt charts and asking “dumb” questions.
Using a Gantt chart
A Gantt
chart is simply a graphical illustration that shows a schedule of specific project
tasks, their dependencies and timelines.
The power of a Gantt chart is simply that all the tasks are in one
place. When managing a project, I took
the information out of people’s heads and put it in some kind of order -- who’s
supposed to do what, for how long, what has to happen first – so I could manage
against it.
That same
technique can be applied life and career development. Any time you want to do something, whether
it’s renovating the kitchen, planning for a child’s college education or
looking for a new job, you can put together a Gantt chart. (You can just draw it on paper, use Excel or
get fancy and use Microsoft Project). What
is the first task that has to get done? Who can do it? What comes next? What or
who is each task dependent on? How long should each task date? What is the
deadline for completion?
Asking “dumb” questions
I used to facilitate
meetings with all the people involved in a process that we were trying to re-engineer
to make it more efficient (faster, cheaper, less labor intensive, etc.). People processes were often more difficult to
deal with than purely technical processes because of the emotions and egos involved.
I would
say, “My job in this meeting is to ask the dumb questions that nobody else in
the room is going to ask, because you think you’re supposed to know the answer.” I would ask, “Why do we have to do this
report? Why do we need 10 signoffs to spend $10,000? Why is step in the process
here?” And I truly wanted to know so I
would ask them in a nonjudgmental way.
The
answers to those “dumb” questions very often would help diagnose the root cause
of the problems and identify what to change as we designed the future state.
The
willingness to ask dumb questions still allows me now to be creative, because I
can look at my own life or my client’s situation and ask the questions that
seem to be obvious, but that no one’s willing to ask, “Is there another way we
could do this? What do other people do? How could we do this completely
differently? What if we didn’t do this at all?”
As a
project manager, you can borrow these same techniques or use some of your own
to apply to your life and career. They
can help you manage elements such as schedule, budget, scope, communication and risk that can
impact your plans to build a happy life and a successful career.
Gilda Bonanno's blog www.gildabonanno.blogspot.com