Monday, April 17, 2006

Let’s Face It - Its Overhead

There can be no doubt about it, project management systems impose an overhead on you which may not be justifiable because they are too complex and/or bureaucratic.

But Sometimes, Absolutely Necessary

There are some jobs which simply cannot be done effectively without a formal Project Management System (PMS.) Jobs like:

• Designing and building a hospital, a power station, an airliner or a nuclear submarine
• Organizing the London Marathon, staging a performance of Wagner's Ring Cycle or running a NASCAR race
• Implementing major software projects
  

Maybe A Good Idea?

There are jobs you can do without a formal PMS, but they tend to stress you out and you may end up with a crappy result because you can't stay on top of the "unforeseen happenings." Jobs like:

• Building a new home or small apartment block
  
• Installing an escalator to replace a stairway or refurbishing the air-conditioning for an office block
  
• Staging a local rock concert or running a series of local league football games
• Moving a business to a another area

Don't Bug Me

There are jobs that are routinely and successfully done without a formal PMS, such as:

• Refurbishing an interior, re-roofing a home, rebuilding an antique car, landscaping a garden
• Catering for or just planning a wedding, arranging a funeral, organizing a class reunion
• Rewiring a home, adding an extension, painting the outside of a building
• Moving to another city or country, relocating your office

It is easy to see that the higher the level of complexity, the greater the need for a formal PMS. For this reason almost all of the early project management protocols grew out of the need to formalize the management of projects which were so complex as to be almost impossible without them - projects like building the first nuclear submarines, the Apollo Missions and so forth. With such a heritage, it is no wonder that many of today's project management systems impose resource and know-how requirements, not to mention jargon, which frightens you, when all you want is some way to help with your conflicting pressures.

So Is There Any Help?

If you manage jobs and projects that are in the "Maybe a Good Idea?" category AND you have a number of projects with a number of different customers or independent participants going on at the same time, then JobWarden can help because it is light-weight and conversational. By "light-weight" we mean both:

• Requiring few of your resources in time money, personnel and infrastructure and
• Easy to use by anyone inyour organization, from CEO to the company computer geek and all disciplines in between.

By conversational, we mean ... erm ... conversational, as in interaction between people using a common language without the need for facilitators, gurus and interpreters.

We mean, of course, JobWarden.