New Year’s Resolutions & Project Management: A Match Made in Heaven?

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

 

When I learned of this month’s theme of “PM Resolutions” on ProjectManagement.com, it presented an opportunity to have some fun with it. So let’s take a slightly (but only slightly) tongue-in-cheek look at some of the more common New Year’s resolutions—and see how they apply to project management.

Losing weight
I’ll start with this one because it’s close to home to me—my wife tells me it’s my resolution for this year. When people resolve to try and lose weight, it’s generally because they want to become healthier and fitter, able to become more active, perhaps do more with their family and friends, and so on. We view the outcomes of losing weight as positive to other areas of our lives.

Well, the same concept applies to project management. Do we really need a team that is so big and bloated, or could we be a little more agile (small “a”), better able to adjust and adapt, if our teams were a little smaller and more focused?

Traditional project management has always been about trying to secure the biggest team possible as a hedge against bottlenecks and delays, but is that really the best approach? I think many project managers can look at their plans and either reduce the number of people allocated, reduce the time window that a particular individual is assigned for, or both.

That in turn …

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