CHAPTER EIGHT

People do not decide to become extraordinary. They decide to accomplish extraordinary things.

Some skills are peripheral to success. They are helpful to your career, but they don’t determine your level of success or failure. There are other skills, however, that are absolutely essential to your fulfilling your potential, and you must develop them to a fairly high degree if you are to achieve all of your financial and career goals.

One of these absolutely essential skills is the ability to manage projects of various sizes. A project can be defined as a multitask job, the kind that you engage in every day in the course of making a living and carrying on the business of your life. To be a success, you must be good at project management.

Avoid the Intelligence Trap

One of the great dangers in project management is feeling that you already know all you need to know about the subject. Too many people take their ability to do several jobs at once, or in a row, for granted. They fall into the intelligence trap of the low-performer. They use their intelligence to point out to themselves and to others how confident and capable they already are. They join the ranks of the unconscious incompetents. The unconscious incompetent is the person who does not know, and does not know that he or she does not know.

A Basic Life Skill

Project management is an essential skill, and not just for those who build hydroelectric dams or construct huge skyscrapers. You organize and engage in a project each time you go shopping at the grocery store. If you are in sales, every prospect you are working on developing into a regular customer is a project. If you are going out for the evening with another person, you are planning and organizing a project.

Here is a key point: your ability to organize and complete a project successfully is a vital skill for success. It is the essential art of management. It is the way that you multiply your abilities and your results. Your ability to manage projects of all kinds is absolutely indispensable to your increasing your value and earning what you are really worth. This skill is the key to achieving financial independence and moving to the top in your field.

Be the Best in Your Field

Many people can type, but few people can type eighty or ninety words a minute without mistakes. Millions of people know how to operate computers, but only a few can use the computer skillfully enough to maximize its capacities in helping them do their work and accomplish their objectives. Many people can sell, but the top 10 percent of salespeople still open 80 percent of the new accounts and make most of the money.

Project management is similar. Everyone knows how to carry out a multitask job. But few people are good at it. Most are partially organized and partially disorganized. They take too much time, spend too much money, and make too many mistakes in getting from Point A to Point B. They don’t manage the projects in their lives skillfully because they don’t know how critical this ability is to accomplishing virtually everything else they could possibly want in life.

To succeed in life, you need leverage. You need the assistance of others. If you want to achieve big things, and live a great life, you need the help of lots of people. You need to be very good at coordinating the activities of several people in a single direction toward a predetermined objective. If you don’t develop your skills at project management, you will still be involved in projects, but you will always be a team member and never a team leader.

Outsourcing and Project Management

The economic strength of America is due to many things, and one of the most important is specialization of tasks, or division of labor. This simply means that most people, instead of trying to be jacks-of-all-trades, specialize and become very good at doing one or two things. They delegate everything else.

Today, one of the most popular words in American business is outsourcing. This means that instead of hiring or building a capability in-house, you delegate an entire function of your company to another company that specializes in doing only that one task.

Many companies are finding that it is cheaper than doing it themselves to have functions such as payroll, accounting, drop-shipping, manufacturing, assembly, delivery, and distribution, plus a thousand other tasks, done by other companies.

You Are Outsourcing Continually

Your whole life is a process of outsourcing. Whether you are aware of it or not, you are continually outsourcing tasks and activities to a hundred other enterprises, such as grocery stores, restaurants, dry cleaners, quick-oil-change franchises, and tailors. You don’t bother to learn how to do those things yourself. It is much faster and cheaper for you to turn the tasks over to people who specialize in them. They can do the tasks faster, better, and with fewer mistakes than you ever could. By outsourcing, you free up your time to do more and more of the things that you do best and for which you are paid the most. It is one of the keys to developing the leverage that turns you into a multiplication sign with your talents and abilities.

The Key to High Productivity

In project management, you engage in a systematic and well-organized process of outsourcing the various tasks that need to be done to achieve a particular objective. You develop synergy by pulling together the talents and abilities of a lot of people toward the accomplishment of a single goal. By working together as a team, a group of people with different talents can accomplish extraordinary things. And your ability to get all members of a team pulling in the same direction is the key to your maximizing yourself in your life and career.

To unleash the cooperative capabilities of a team of people toward the achievement of a multitask job, the operative word should be harmony. One of the most important things you can do is to strive for harmony among the people working with you and for you.

Project Management

Project management is an art. It requires thought and foresight. Whenever you have a large job to do, your very first step is to sit down with a pad of paper and begin to think on paper. As we know, all highly successful men and women think on paper. They write things down before they begin. They make lists, and they make sub-lists. They calculate the numbers. They analyze every detail of a large project beforehand. They think it through from beginning to end. And in so doing they save enormous amounts of time and money, and they often get more done in a few months than the average person gets done in years.

Practice and Discipline

Project management takes practice, as does anything else. It requires self-discipline. It requires the willpower to hold yourself back from plunging into a task before thinking it through. Many people work in a reactive-responsive mode. They react to whatever is happening around them, and they respond to however they feel at the moment. They leap into things, and then they leap out. They rush to make judgments and come to decisions, and they take actions without bothering to analyze the situation thoroughly. They make enormous numbers of mistakes and are seen by others as incompetent and disorganized. Don’t be one of those people.

When you decide to become excellent at project management, you begin to apply a systematic process such as the one I will describe. Your ability to achieve multitask jobs will give you the ability to control everything else you accomplish. And it’s not that difficult to learn.

Start with the Finished Project

In executing any project, the first thing to do is start at the goal and work back. Stephen Covey says, “Begin with the end in mind.” Dr. Roberto Assagioli suggests that you begin all activities by creating the ideal result or outcome, either on paper or in your mind, before you proceed to planning and organizing.

Robert Fritz, in his book The Path of Least Resistance, says that the most powerful of all organizing principles is a vision of a clear goal to which you, and others, are committed. In his research on peak performers, Dr. Charles Garfield found that a person’s ability to project his or her mind forward to the desired end state, to the goal as if it were already achieved, to the task as if it were completed perfectly in every respect, is the starting point of maximum achievement.

Each project begins with your clearly defining exactly what you want to accomplish and what it will look like if it is accomplished perfectly.

Organize Each of the Steps

Once you are clear about your goal, the next step in project management is to organize your list of all the things that will need to be done to get to your goal, the completion of your project. There are two ways to organize a list in project management. The first way is sequential. This is where one step follows another. The first task must be completed before the second can be started, the second must be completed before the third can be started, and so on. These are often called dependent activities. One activity depends on the successful completion of the previous. This is a key point to remember in managing a project of any size.

The second way to list activities in project management is as parallel or concurrent activities. These are tasks that can be worked on at the same time, each separate from the others. For example, if you are planning a new brochure or newsletter you could be writing the copy at the same time that you are selecting paper stock or gathering possible photographs to illustrate the content.

Remember the Six P Rule? Proper Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance. Your ability to plan your projects carefully and thoroughly in advance can dramatically increase your productivity.

Once you have the goal in mind, and have listed everything that you must do to achieve the goal, and have organized everything in terms of whether it is sequential or concurrent, you are ready for the core exercise of effective project management. It is the key to your future in the world of work. It is the process of selection and delegation.

Selection and Delegation

The bigger the project, the more people will be required to carry it through to successful completion. Your ability to select the right people and then to delegate effectively to them will determine, as much as any other factor, your project’s success or failure. A mistake in selection or a miscommunication in delegation can be enough to set it back, have it run over budget, or even derail it completely.

Many men and women have been able to shoot ahead in their careers by taking on a project and then performing in an exemplary fashion. Others have found themselves bypassed for promotion because when they were given a project to carry out, they did not take it seriously enough, and their lack of results undermined their superiors’ confidence in their abilities. Project management is serious stuff.

Project Management Problems

Almost all problems in business are management problems, which are in effect project-management problems. This is often why when a new manager comes in he or she replaces everyone on the team. The new manager recognizes that the reason why the job isn’t getting done is probably that the person in charge of the multitask job—manufacturing, sales, distribution, or whatever—is not up to the task.

When you build your team, you make a statement about your capability as a manager. As much as 95 percent of your success in the business world will be determined by your ability to select the right people to help you. Most of your problems in business come from attempting to get the job done with difficult or incompetent people.

Your job is to select the very best people available who can do the job. Examine each person’s track record carefully. Check references. Talk to other people about the task, and get opinions concerning each individual’s ability to do it in an excellent fashion.

Be careful about your choices, and be adamant about assigning key tasks to the very best people. This will save you enormous amounts of time and trouble.

One key point: if you find that you have selected the wrong person, someone who cannot or will not do the job on time to the required level of quality, move quickly to remove and replace the poor performer. One weak person on a team can sabotage the efforts of everyone and demoralize your best people. This replacement of a person who is not working out is a chief responsibility of leadership.

Multiply Yourself with Delegation

Once you have selected the individuals to carry out the specific parts of the project, you must delegate effectively to each of them. Assign specific responsibilities for each task necessary to complete the project to specific individuals. Set deadlines on each task and each part of each task. Explain to each person what is to be done, when it is to be done, what standards of measurement you will use to determine successful performance, and what the overall project will look like when it is complete. Leave nothing to chance. The more people know about the what and why of the total job, the more capable they will be of carrying out their individual functions.

Lack of clarity is the single greatest contributor to failure in project management. For this reason, it is important that you meet regularly with the members of your team, either individually or together. You keep in touch with them on a regular basis. You keep them informed. You give and receive feedback. And the more important the project is, the more you stay on top of it.

Make the Project Visual

Just as it is important for you to think on paper when organizing a project for yourself, it is helpful for you to use a whiteboard or a flip chart when you are meeting with the members of your team. The more visual you can make the project, and the process of achieving the goal, the more likely it is that each task will be completed on schedule and to the standards you have set.

You supervise the project by measuring people’s progress toward their individual deadlines. Your supervision of the project is what makes it all come together. The rule is “Inspect what you expect.” Never assume anything. Remember, Murphy’s laws were developed by men and women managing projects of various sizes.

Murphy’s Laws

You know some of these laws:

1. Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.

2. However much you budget, it will cost more than you expect.

3. However long you allow, it will take longer than you thought.

4. Of all the things that can go wrong, the worst possible thing will go wrong at the worst possible time, and cost the greatest amount of money.

And, of course, there is the corollary to Murphy’s laws: Murphy was an optimist.

Identify the Limiting Step

In project management, there is always a critical event, or limiting step. This is the one factor that determines the speed at which you complete the project. This is the one task that absolutely, positively has to be done to a set standard for the project to be successful. It is in this area that you must take personal responsibility and focus your attention on making sure that everything is done right. Keep your eyes on the ball, even if you delegate or outsource part or all of the task.

You can use project management to develop a new account, to increase your income, to attain a high level of physical health and fitness, to take a vacation, to move across the country, to start and build a business, to write a book, to paint a picture, or to sail a catamaran around the world.

Gain the Winning Edge

Throughout your career, the proper use of project-management techniques such as those we have discussed here can give you the winning edge. It can enable you to kick on the afterburners for your life and your career. The skill of project management will enable you to move ahead further and faster than you ever could without it. Although the steps to project management are simple, the skill of project management is complex, and it is vital to your success.

The cumulative results of your developing the skills of project management will enable you to accomplish bigger and better tasks with greater responsibilities and higher income—with greater rewards of all kinds. Project management is an essential skill for you in earning what you are really worth, and you can learn it with practice.

Action Exercises:

1. Select one project that you are working on right now or that you would like to complete, and follow the professional approach suggested in this chapter.

2. Determine the ideal result or outcome that would occur if the project were completed perfectly. Write it down.

3. Make a list of every step that you will have to take to complete the project on time and on budget.

4. Organize the list of activities by sequence and priority, those tasks that must be done in order and those tasks that can be done at any time.

5. Decide exactly who is going to be responsible for the completion of each task or function within each task, and decide the schedule for completion.

6. Select the members of your team and discuss the project with them in detail so that each person knows exactly what he or she is expected to do.

7. Take action immediately, and then continuously monitor and supervise the activities of the team until the project is completed satisfactorily.