Why I love basketball…

The best thing I have done in recent weeks was to start going to basketball games with my son. Almost every Sat night we grab a bag of popcorn and join other fans to cheer for our local premiership team.

Apart from being fun and exciting to watch (and play!), I love basketball because there is so much we project managers can learn from it! I can’t help myself and watching the games I continually look for similarities with the project management world. And, there are so many! Here are just a few:

• Scope - it couldn’t be clearer, all passes must be well planned and agreed, avoiding useless passes that do not add any value, i.e. do not lead to earning at least two points or preventing the other team from doing so
• Time – there are only 40min in the game, event your Sponsor can't grand an extension, so need to plan and execute all the smart moves within this boundary
• Quality - oh, the spectators, including my 5 year old son, are very quick to let you know when you’re failing on this one!
• Risk - every move the players and the coach make is about managing risks
• Human resources - particularly teamwork and R & R’s, unless the team has a strong agreement and execution of the agreed roles, they are doomed for failure
• Communication - with most rounds taking less than a minute, how the team communicates can make or break it; use of codes, sign language and "short-hand" to communicate “secret” strategies requires a lot of planning and practice, something we often undermine in the project world when it comes to communication
• Integration - executing each of the strategies on the court is all about integration; regardless how good a move an individual player makes it’s pointless, or sometimes even impossible, unless it’s built into a broader picture; one such brilliant chain of moves that led to a spectacular finish was when the middle player unexpectedly (or so to an unaware observer) made a long pass towards what looked like an empty space, only to have the ball caught by another player who appeared from nowhere, caught the ball mid-air and immediately placed it in the hoop! It was an incredible display of not only skill but also communication, teamwork, timing, and the good old integration.

If you are in project management, you will most likely notice that I’ve left 2 components out: cost and procurement. This was intentional and I’d like to encourage you to post a comment with your suggestions on how these two aspects of project management present themselves in a basketball game (trying to stay from the obvious like buying equipment and managing the budget – be creative!)

One of my previous blogs was about useless discussions… that post was also inspired by a basketball game and again it’s so relevant to project management. Read it here

Happy Bouncing!

So much to do ... so little time!

Sounds familiar? Oh, yes! There are only 24hrs in a day and noone can change it. Most of us would like to do heaps every day but when you look at it you can only do so much. Say you do a To Do list and it has 20 items ... what are the chances that you get ALL 20 completed in a day? Slim.... very slim.. close to impossible...Why? Don't know what your life and work is but mine has been dominated by constantly being distructed to complete the stuff on my To Do List.. so after checking the email in the morning, attending meetings virtually back-to-back all day I start on my To Do List around 5pm... how much of it do you think I can complete? 20 items .. and if you allocate 15min per item on average, that's 300min = 5 hours....which means staying in the office till 10pm!

This is why I keep saying we all need to take a good hard look at what we are doing to make sure we really are investing our time wisely, spending it on value add activities and have a perspective on life ... there are so many people that are worse off than us even if that means failing to launch to project on the expected day.

So, keep everything in perspective. If your job involves saving lives, this is your priority! Your life and the life you are saving are your priorities! Not the timeline or budget but what's actually important in a given situation.

And, don't forget YOU are important and YOU need to take care of yourself!

Come on! Go out there! Enjoy life!

Why are we wasting time on pointless discussions/arguments?

I always wonder this when watching a sports game, and basketball is my favourite at the moment. You see both the players and the coaches arguing with referees... I can't stop thinking: what's the point? I have never seen a positive outcome of these arguments and I just don't understand why they're wasting everyone's time and disrupting the game, not to mention the lack of respect those arguments are showing for the referees. This article sheds some light on why those arguments happen so often (entertainment, adrenaline, players following the coaches etc.)

Interestingly, we often engage in similar fruitless, time-wasting discussions not only in our personal but also our professional life, including project management. Think about all those "challenging" stakeholders you have had on your projects and the number of times you've been involved in pro-longed debates, often heated, that were just pointless.

So, next time such situation arises, think about that basketball game. Is it worth my/my teams' time and effort or shall I just take a deep breath and look for alternative ways to resolve the situation. This is what I have been doing for a while now and it seems to work. We gain some perspective on things when we take time out (this time a useful strategy sourced from a basketball game!), and allow ourselves to re-think what's best for the project and plan our next conversation with that in mind.

Going to see another basketball game with my son next weekend so will look out for some more similarities with the project world. Stay tuned!