The Secret Life of Projects, Part 2

David Schmaltz is a project manager in Takoma Park, Maryland.

  Communications Management   Innovation   ProjectsAtWork  

Finding the right “fit” for your project, rather than following some previously derived ‘One Best Way’, might well be your most critical success factor as a project leader. It requires simultaneously balancing contradictions and it demands a different way of social interacting. How well does your project fit?

My mother was a tailor when I was a kid. Fine ladies would stop by for fittings, and we’d be chased out of the music room while my mom escorted her latest lucky client into her “fitting room.” Later, the lady would leave smiling, sometimes with a new gown and sometimes with a promise to have those adjustments done by Thursday. “You kids stay out of those pins,” mom would call as we re-entered the suddenly mysterious music room to find her sawdust-filled strawberry pin holder on the piano and a hint of chalk dust and elegant perfume in the air.

What were they doing in there? This was one of the great mysteries of my childhood. I suspected that the elegant ladies undressed in there, and this was mystery enough for my ten-year-old imagination. Besides undressing, they were performing a ritual critical to any dressmaker’s success. Not pattern matching or fabric selection. Not sewing, either. They were fitting. This involved trying on the new garment — often in shreds of unsewn material — and pinning it to …

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