Why Project Managers Make the Best Car Buyers

Mike Donoghue is a member of a multinational information technology corporation where he collaborates on the communications guidelines and customer relationship strategies affecting the interactions with internal and external clients. He has analyzed, defined, designed and overseen processes for various engagements including product usability and customer satisfaction, best practice enterprise standardization, relationship/branding structures, and distribution effectiveness and direction. He has also established corporate library solutions to provide frameworks for sales, marketing, training, and support divisions.

  Change Management   Procurement Management   Risk Management   Scope Management   Stakeholder Management  

Project managers are at home with wrangling reports, juggling stakeholders, and putting on Oscar-winning performances as they calmly tell executives that the project is only three weeks behind, but everything’s fine. These fine skills and others associated with PMs often don’t get recognized as also being important to other formidable lifetime challenges—like buying a car.

Regardless of whether you have your eyes on a sleek hybrid or electric, something in the practical SUV line, or another vehicle that makes some wonderful scary noises when you accelerate around the neighborhood, the car-purchase process possesses some amazing similarities to those abilities used in managing a project.

Before We Visit the Dealer…

Step 1: What exactly are we buying here? (Or, let’s define the scope…)

The first step in project management is finding out which features are needed, which are nice to have, and which are insane and unrealistic. Do you see the parallel?

Decision time. Are you looking to purchase a straightforward commuter car, or are you planning ahead and telling yourself that you need a pickup truck because you plan on making a number of home improvements (deck, landscaping, storage shed, etc.)?

Just as scope creep occurs in the land of IT projects, it likewise happens in car buying. You may be looking at a reliable hatchback …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.