How to Use Project Management Techniques Outside of Projects
Adriana Girdler, CET, PMP
Helping project managers and accidental PMs successfully achieve project goals with an efficient, practical, non-chaotic system | Award-winning Project Manager | Workout & Guitar Enthusiast
Most transferable project management skills and how to use them!
Are you familiar with project management techniques and are wondering how you can use them outside of projects?
There are lots of project management techniques designed to help your projects run smoothly that can actually be transferred into other roles and responsibilities you might have in your career. But it’s critical to know exactly what that looks like so that you can maximize on using what you know to better every aspect of your life.
1. After Action Reviews
If you’ve done projects, you’ve definitely done an after action review.
What is an After Action Review?
Sometimes they’re called Lessons Learned or Post Mortems. But in essence, when you are finished a major milestone or activity and you want to understand how well you did and how you can improve it, you do an After Action Review.
How is this transferable?
An AAR can be used for practically anything that goes on in business... PARTICULARLY when something didn’t go as well as expected. If you want to take out any emotional charge and not make people feel like they’re being blamed for what went wrong, an After Action Review is a great way to put things back on track in a neutral way.
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2. Priority Matrix
In projects, you build everything around SCOPE, TIME, and BUDGET. It really helps project success when you have a priority matrix that lays out these three aspects in order of importance.
Not everything is number one on a project, and this is the same everywhere in business. If you’re going to be successful on every deliverable, you need to know what is a priority versus what is flexible to help you achieve that goal and move things forward.
When it comes to using a priority matrix outside of a project, a priority matrix is a great thing to use for yearly planning. When you use a priority matrix for each item of your yearly planning session, then you can always refer back to it throughout the year when things are happening to ensure that you don’t get off track.
Other transferable project techniques
I truly believe that these techniques and skills are critical for every professional to have. So, let’s keep chatting about this! Head over to YouTube with me to watch the full video that I made with lots more information on this exact topic.
On top of that, in my course SLAY Project Management I go through every project management technique you’ll need for a successful career, including how to use them in both project and non-project settings. Make sure you check it out.
-Adriana