Recently, I wrote about your Christmas dinner as a project management exercise. But now that it’s just about Christmas, I’ve realized that the real project management guru of the season is Santa himself. What a project: Making toys for good little girls and boys and then delivering them in one night. Can you imagine the complexity that a project like that would have?
Number crunching
First, let’s think of the numbers: According to The Economist’s Pocket World in Figures, there are about 6.4 billion people in the world and about 28% of them of them are under 15 years old. Using some broad assumptions about the age of kids who believe in Santa (let’s say 10 and under), along with the understanding that not every child in the world lives in a country or practices a religion that recognizes the fat jolly man (let’s say three quarters to be safe, but it’s probably far more), I’m estimating about 300,000,000 children get toys from Santa each year.
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Running a small business is all about problems!
- You’ll be more successful when you identify a problem that your target market is facing… and you solve it.
- While many of your customers will leave happy, some will return the product or express dissatisfaction with the service – that’s a problem.
- You’ll also encounter problems each and every day – whether staff issues or accounts receivables challenges or vendor concerns – all of which can hold your business back from the success you desire.
- Even working on big projects, which requires a certain amount of project management, also requires a healthy dose of problem solving to navigate complex projects through to their successful completion.
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The transition from working for someone else to working for yourself is not an easy transition. There are lots of people who dream of making that switch but, when it comes right down to it, they can’t. (Or, they do and then they switch back).
The reason is simple: Even though you might have good days and bad days working as an employee, your job is generally predictable: You show up and do your work and you go home at the end of the day.
It’s not like that for entrepreneurs. Here are three skills that aspiring entrepreneurs need in order to be successful:
Embrace the unknown. Small business ownership is not predictable. Some days will be quiet, other days will be insane. For many businesses, the question mark of “where do I get the next client” always seems just around the corner and it never goes away. I have one colleague who has been a successful consultant for years and tells me that it took him years to accept the fact that he was only two weeks away from having no clients. That means he needs to keep an ongoing marketing system in place to make sure that there are always clients who “appear” regularly in order to mitigate that two week cliff.
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When you’re putting together a project there will come a time when you need to file a report. But how do you do it… and how do you do it well?
I’m reminded of a story once where I worked on a project (as an employee who participated, not as the project manager). The project manager had to create a weekly report that estimated the time we spent on the project. They had each employee estimate the number of hours we worked on the project. Then they took those numbers and (fully admitted to us) padded the numbers to bring them in line with expectations (I guess we were too efficient or the project manager needed to justify their budget). It made me look at project management reporting with disdain so I’ve revised how I manage projects ever since.
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“Can I have a show of hands?” is a project killer.
There, I said it.
If you’ve said this, you can be forgiven for saying it because few people realize just how poisonous it is to a project. Part of the reason is that most of us have grown up in a democratic society (whether the US or somewhere else – many places have some kind of democratic process in place) and we value democracy as a right and a key to our freedom as human beings. When we have a say, we have power and provide a check and balance to those we have asked to be in charge.
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Perfectionism sounds like a great ideal to strive for in business and in project management but it is a mirage – a hazy image on the horizon that will never be achieved.
It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about a large business, a small business, a start-up, a department, or a project that is being managed within an organization – businesses need to work towards high quality completion but NOT perfectionism.
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In medium-to-large organizations, middle managers have a real project management challenge: They need to run their part of the organization efficiently and implement programs and projects to do their job effectively. And, in order to do that, they need to get buy-in from levels above them (for sponsorship and project funding) and levels below them (for the roll-up-the-sleeves work required to implement the project).
Sorry to deliver the bad news, folks, but this requires an ability to sell. Now I suspect that those who like to sell are in the sales department and that those who prefer to do anything other than selling are in other departments. You may have joined IT because you liked IT; sales was never something you’d consider doing. You may have joined a product-development department because you liked R&D, branding, and bringing products to market; sales was never something you’d consider doing.
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