RRR of Project Management - Mother as a PM

This article is intended to provide you insights on how effectively you can manage projects without having much knowledge about project management or if you are a budding manager & want to excel in field of project management or if you are a seasoned project manager but finding it hard to impart or transfer the knowledge to your new team members.

In my tenure, I have been dealing with many freshers / college pass outs who might have been getting good grades in college or must have topped the campus placements however they face real challenges once they land on their first live project. I am going to make your life easy by giving you insights on the RRR of project management.

You will find below definitions as per PMBOK and if you google more we will see how these definitions converge to our idea of project management i.e. RRR!!!

Project management?is the?use of specific knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to deliver something of value to people.

Project management is the process of leading the work of a team to achieve all project goals within the given constraints.

You all would agree with me, whether you execute the project using #agile or #waterfall , you need to effectively utilize the resources while minimizing risks and drive high customer satisfaction. With that note, I have summarized my project management experience in a more easy way that would cover 80% of things you should appreciate while executing projects. One of the recent highest gross earning movie #RRR acronym will help you in managing projects efficiently by knowing how to deal with these key attributes of project management not limited to #Resource, #Relationship & #Risk.

Manage your Resources

Manage your Relationships

Manage you Risks

We will take a very simple example of your mother as a Project Manager(PM),

the project she recently working on is organizing a house warming party

for 20 guest aka 4-5 families. We will see how she unkowingly utilizes

the RRR of project management.

Resources - Plan & Build

As a Project Manager, you should be aware the resources involved in project execution, these resources are not limited to human resource, raw material, inputs from other projects , though this is most impacting of all.

Being in your mothers shoe, you would appreciate that she would have done below tasks well in advance i.e.

• finalized the date & time, #golive
• notified the guests about the venue, #stakeholdermanagement
• plan for raw material required for food preparation, #projectplanning
• plan & finalize for the resources required on the venue like, crockery, seating arrangement, music, directions #resourcemanagemen
• not to forget delegating tasks that she is not good on, may be ordering raw material, dusting, seating, etc.. #delegation

This brings in to our key learnings from this R i.e. one needs to plan & build the resources for effective project delivery. As we saw in our example a mother had N number of resources to deal with internal (available at home) & external ( need to arrange). The question would come in your mind ,can resources alone make her a good PM?, the answer is no as she also takes care of the other two R's. Let us uncover the other R's.

Risks - Anticipate & manage

How often we have seen that during a party there is either a shortage of food, or the food is spicy, or the guests finding it difficult to reach, or the deserts have not arrived, or external factors like rain, storm, electricity outage impacts your party adversely. In project management we call them as risks, a good PM will always anticipate risks & would have plans to manage those risks effectively.

Continuing with our example you would have seen your mother/spouse anticipating & managing these risks by cooking extra, a side dish which is less spicy, providing directions to guests, having ice cream brick and also managing external risks by having candles to make a WOW (#customerdelight ) to the guests by having a candle light dinner (#customerexperience ) even in worst conditions(electricity outage) , this how if risks are anticipated well in advance they can also be treated as an opportunity during project delivery.

Final question, Is your mother a super woman or goddess Durga with 8-10 hands, then how does she makes things so simple? The answer lies in the 3rd R i.e. Relationship.

Relationship - Manage & Nurture

Well having a housing warming with 20 guests (4-5 families) is like making each department happy on the new process automation that you did. There would always be that one person, department or team member who will not be happy with your project implementation.

This brings in to our most important attribute of the Project Manager i.e. how to manage & nurture relationship. I will be discussing this topic in a separate article as when you have humans involved it becomes very challenging to make them feel involved & valued.

Consider the guest list includes your Bua Ji(Husband's sister), Fufa ji (Husband's brother in law), Jija ji (Daughter's husband aka Son in Law). adding some humor to the article these are the 3 very critical stakeholders in any Indian family which are very hard to manage & they are never happy and always complaint about that they are not being involved, not valued & so on...

Mother on the other side knows how to manage & nurture this relationship, she must have asked father to do a separate call to all of them, must have asked about their food preferences, venue preferences, shared google location of the venue, may be a special gift or acknowledgment in public about them & their involvement.

To my best knowledge & practice if we these 3 R's right in place your project will never go wrong. I will be going to pen down about how to manage uncontrolled risk & the impact of relationships in a separate article.

Thanks for reading through, since you have read till last, mention any incident of your mother/spouse which made you believe that she is the best project manager in the world.

#projectmanagement #stakeholdermanagement #riskmangement #RRRofprojectmanagement #rrr #rrrmovie #resourceplanning #resources #resourcemanagement #projectdelivery