Using Real Life to Simplify Project-Related Concepts

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.

  Leadership  

For many years, I have been teaching project management and related concepts to different groups. When I first started teaching, I was using material developed by other people. I had to review it and prove that I not only knew the material and concepts, but that I could convey those ideas to the people in my classes. That was a bit of a problem for me because, to put it politely, a lot of that material stunk.

The concepts themselves were accurate—the definitions, formulas and what have you were all correct. But the way that they were explained, and the examples used, were completely unrelatable. They made no sense to me (and I had quite a bit of project experience), and they certainly made no sense to the people in the classes—the glazed looks I saw every time was proof enough of that.

Fast-forward many years, and not a lot has changed in many of those classes. There are still a lot of courses that use examples that make it harder to understand what is being explained, not easier.

I long ago began teaching my own material with examples that I developed and refined over time, hopefully making it easier for students to relate to the ideas. But this isn’t just about training courses—similar confusion is often created when a department is trying to explain a concept, when organizations are communicating strategies and so on.

It all strikes me as …

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