The Fortune Cookie Wisdom Guide to Project Management (Part 2)

Ian Whittingham, PMP is director of Calixo Consulting, providing project and program management expertise from initiation through to implementation, covering business transformation, workflow process re-engineering, and enterprise data integration. He is a regular contributor to ProjectManagement.com. You may contact Ian directly at [email protected].

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With few exceptions, if any, all projects are rational endeavors. They are the outcome of detailed planning, diligent coordination and rigorous control. That’s the ideal we aspire to. But at the very least, we would certainly never undertake a project on nothing more than a wing and a prayer…would we?

Our confidence in achieving a project’s goals frequently correlate with the degree to which we believe a project is under our control. But that judgment--as to how much control we really have over our project--is as much an emotional response as a rational one. And when things don’t turn out as expected, well, we just attribute our bad luck to either hubris or to happenstance, undoing all that careful planning we did.

No project manager would ever be so foolish as to leave the outcome of their project to chance events and simply hope they might get lucky. So it might appear odd for me to be looking inside a fortune cookie to find project management wisdom. But as we saw in Part 1 of this series, those simple mottoes can sometimes offer up more wisdom than first meets the eye.  

Every man is a volume if you know how to read him
Lucky Numbers 19 11 32 7 28 5

Be honest: Is there really anyone on your project team who you can “read like a book”? But how much easier would managing a project be if we could do that, if we had…

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