The Perfect First Project

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   New Practitioners  

I was recently asked what a project manager’s perfect first project looked like—that is, what were the characteristics of a project that was ideally suited for a PM to gain their first experience of the discipline.

It’s a difficult question to answer, because the perfect project for one PM might not be the perfect project for another—but I think that there are some characteristics that we can look for.

What are we trying to achieve?
We have to start by considering what the purpose of those first projects is. Certainly, the project itself needs to contribute to the business—it needs to be a “real” project rather than something irrelevant that only exists as a way for a new PM to gain experience. But the main purpose has to be to allow that new PM to put their training into practice, to develop some early experience leading people, delivering work, and overcoming challenges, and (hopefully) to enjoy some early successes.

That leads us to what I would consider to be a minimum set of requirements for those first projects. They need to have a reasonable-sized team—six to eight people tends to work well in my experience. That’s small enough to remain manageable, while still being large enough to require the PM to demonstrate leadership and team-building abilities.

I also prefer a project that falls between about three…

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