Over the years I have delivered several hundred two-day project management seminars. Different people attended for different reasons. Many were seasoned PM’s managing projects from several hundred million dollars to Billion dollar plus projects. At the other end of the spectrum were Executive Administrative Assistants helping out their bosses with various small in-house projects. In either case the following definition of a project may be helpful.
A Project is a one-time, multi-task job that has clearly determined starting and ending dates, a specific scope of work to be performed, a budget and a specified level of performance to be achieved.
Some companies have successfully used the project management model as a way of managing the entire company. There are some benefits to that particular model. For purposes of today’s blog, let’s look another word that gets a bad wrap. The word is Problem. We’ve all heard statements like a problem is a “challenge”. A problem is an “opportunity”, etc. There is validity to looking at it that way. Even better, looking at problems as a flag to identify a potential project is very helpful as well.
A few years ago I was consulting with a hospital in Northern California. In one of our brainstorming sessions I asked “what percentage of your time is being spent each day solving problems that were a direct result of poor process?” There were over a dozen director level nurses in this particular meeting. The answer was not surprising. Across the board the answer was that 25% of their days were spent handling problems that were a direct result of poor process. The information gathered that day was a veritable gold mine of opportunity. Because there were a dozen or so departments represented in the meeting, it was easier to identify the “five whys” of the problems. Each presented opportunity to be solved through developing a project for each of the problems identified.
The average salary of the director level nurses ranged from $65,000 to $85,000 a year. It doesn’t take much work to do the math. Not only were these nurses spending time correcting errors, but those expenditures reverberated throughout the organization. Annually the cost was estimated to be in excess of $500,00 dollars. Simple projects solving in-house problems, by refining process through project management methodologies is a cornerstone of Basics Redefined.
