16

Learning from Your Experience

In this chapter, you learn how to maintain perspective in your role as project manager, the enduring value of mastering project management software, why it pays to keep your eyes and ears open, and how to be ready for what’s next.

Life Is for Learning

Whether you volunteered to lead your current project or were assigned to it, and whether you eagerly anticipate starting work each day or dread it, it’s vital to keep your role as project manager in perspective. Managing a project—and managing it well—often leads to managing larger projects; acquiring increasingly valuable, marketable skills; being promoted as a supervisor, manager, or department head; gaining respect and admiration; and earning increases in pay, bonuses, and other perks.

Perhaps you were assigned the role of project manager because no one else was available. Or, someone higher up in your organization believed that you likely could handle the job. Maybe you are being groomed to tackle even greater levels of responsibility.

Any project can be viewed as a stepping-stone along your long-term career path. No project is too inconsequential, too low a priority, or too outside your immediate interest area. Some projects represent large steps and some tiny steps. In each case, you have several opportunities:

◾  Undoubtedly you will learn things along the way that you can unleash at other times and places in your career. What opportunities, educational or otherwise, might ensue? These opportunities, educational or otherwise, might occur: learning new software, meshing well with diverse groups of people, influencing others (since as a project manager at every point along the way you are selling one thing or another), and gaining a greater appreciation for your organization’s processes.

◾  When you work with a project team, you develop bonds with individuals who have potential future value. Maybe they will work with you on other projects. Perhaps you will be reporting to them on projects. Their skills and interests ultimately might positively affect the direction of your career path.

◾  Even if you can’t stand some of your project staff, you can cultivate your ability to manage effectively. At times in your career you’ll have to work with less than palatable types. You might as well hone your skills now.

◾  Working on a project that represents a departure from what you were managing previously exposes you to new vistas. Perhaps your experience enables you to witness another aspect of your own organization. Conceivably you deal with external elements that represent new and challenging ground for you. Hopefully, you will become more in tune to your own weaknesses as a manager, as a career professional, and as an individual. As such, many a project manager has enrolled in a course or received additional training or sought certification as a result of tackling a challenging project.

◾  You step into the batter’s box where, potentially, all eyes are focused on you. Taking on a project means that others count on you for specific performance over a specific time interval. The authorizing party and the stakeholders have a vested interest in your progress. Being the object of near-constant scrutiny means that you gain the chance to shine in ways that otherwise might be difficult to muster if you were simply performing routine work as part of the rank and file.

In short, consider the opportunity to manage projects, whether large or small, desirable or undesirable, as the distinct opportunities for professional growth that they invariably represent.

Master the Software

People typically don’t learn software unless it is critical to their performance, status, or livelihood. Project management software, discussed in Chapter 11, “Choosing Project Management Software,” and Chapter 12, “A Sampling of Popular Programs,” is applicable to far more than the project at hand. Whatever software skills you develop on the current project are likely to prove valuable on future projects, both for your organization and for those projects you choose to take on individually.

At home, for instance, you might discover the ability to use what you’ve learned on the job to accomplish the following:

◾  Maintain a greater level of control of household expenditures.

◾  Plot the path that you need to take in order to retire by a desired age.

◾  Coordinate personal travel plans as never before.

◾  Help your children to reach their goals in academics, sports, or the arts.

◾  Manage a household renovation project.

Keep Your Eyes Open

How projects are initiated in your organization—by whom, when, and for what desired result—tells you much about the workings of your organization. Are projects routinely initiated as a result of deadlines or competitive pressures? Do they represent customer service initiatives undertaken by the organization to enhance its overall product or service offerings, even in the absence of immediate pressure to achieve more? Forward-thinking organizations purposely operate according to the latter.

Forward-thinking organizations don’t wait for dire circumstances to surface; they proceed in a “managing the beforehand” mode, recognizing that proactive organizations stay in the lead by routinely taking leading, decisive actions.

Whether you’re working for an organization that operates in a crisis mode, one with a leading-edge orientation, or one someplace in between, as a result of your observations as a project manager you’ll likely encounter other opportunities for your organization.

If you stay alert, the execution of your project in pursuit of the desired outcome inevitably leads to insights worth reporting to your authorizing party and stakeholders. Staying alert could lead to the formulation of new projects which, conveniently, will probably be managed by you! Think of it as a Machiavellian win-win situation where you are selfishly identifying what else you’d like to be managing, which happens to coincide with what benefits your organization.

In this regard, you begin to assume more control over your career path than seemed within your grasp before initiating your current project. Effective project managers often create their own path by identifying one project after another. Such projects help both their organizations and the project managers’ own careers.

Along the way, everything that worked well, added to any roadblocks, obstacles, and flat-out failures, becomes useful experience. While you obviously don’t seek to incur a series of frustrations on your current project, recognize that what you experience is a “lesson” for another day that can serve to benefit you in one way or another. Then, current ordeals don’t need to seem so onerous. You can progress, long term, handling the good along with the bad.

Preparing for the Next Project

Since the effective execution of one project often leads to another one, what are you experiencing and accomplishing along the way to improve your capability and readiness to tackle new projects? For example, are you

◾  Maintaining a notebook or file on your hard drive of key project insights?

◾  Denoting the skills and capabilities in detail of the project staffers who contributed to the project in some way?

◾  Compiling a resource file of books, audiovisual material, software, websites, supporting organizations, and other resources that could be useful on future projects?

◾  Establishing relationships with vendors, suppliers, consultants, and other outside product and service advisors?

◾  Cultivating relationships with stakeholders, be they top managers, the authorizing party, clients, customers, other project managers, project team members, department or division heads, plus controllers, accountants, and administrative staff?

◾  Are you pacing yourself so that if you are requested to leap into something else immediately after completing this project, you will be more or less ready? Maintaining such readiness encompasses taking care of yourself, eating balanced meals, perhaps taking vitamin supplements, getting adequate rest, exercising, practicing stress reduction techniques, and allowing yourself to have a life during the course of the project.

In closing, the words of Rudyard Kipling in his classic poem If are apropos:

If

by Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings—nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run—
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!