Critical Chain - Eliyahu M. Goldratt [8]
"Look," he says. "I am a project manager. I am working toward my MBA. This is a project management course, isn't it?"
"Ah! So you chose the course because its title resembles your job title?"
He doesn't answer. What can he say? It's time to let him off the hook.
"Can anybody tell me why he or she chose this course?" I ask the class.
Nobody answers. Maybe I was too intimidating.
"When I was a student," I tell them, "I chose courses that were given by professors who were known to be light on homework. I'm afraid that I'm not one of them."
It helps a little, but not much.
"Listen," I continue. "We all know that you are here to get the degree. To get a piece of paper that will help you climb the organizational ladder. But I hope that you want something more than that. That you want to get know-how that can really help you do your job."
Heads nod around the room.
"You have to choose between two alternatives. One is that I'll stand here, on the podium, and lecture for the entire semester. I can flabbergast you with optimization techniques and take you through every complicated heuristic algorithm. It will be tough to understand, even tougher to use and, I guarantee you, won't help you one iota.
"Or, we can put our heads together and, drawing from your experience and the know-how that exists in books and articles, we can try to figure out how to manage projects better. Which do you choose?"
Not much of a choice is it?
At the back, Mark raises his hand. "So what should I expect from this course?"
Good question. Good man. "Mark, you told us you have problems with your project. I think that this course should give you better ability to deal with those problems."
"Fine with me," he says.
Turning to the class, I start. "Assume that I have good knowledge of the know-how as it is written in books and articles. What we have to find out now is the level of experience you have with projects. So, besides Mark, who else is deeply involved in projects?"
A slim redheaded young man in the third row raises his hand. "My name is Ted and I work in a construction company. Everything we do is a project."
"How long have you been working there?" I ask. "Six years."
"Excellent," I say. "Anybody else?"
To my surprise, nobody else raises a hand. I'm saved by a blond woman, sitting by herself in the front row. Hesitantly, she asks, "Can you define what you mean by a project?"
I swiftly scan in my mind four definitions I read in textbooks. Somehow they all seem too pompous to me. How can one relate to a definition like "A set of activities aimed to achieve a specific objective and have a clear start, middle and end." If I want to bring this course down to earth and relate it to their situations, I'd better not quote any of these oversimplified or complicated definitions. Rather than defining, I choose to describe. I say, "In your work, have you come across a complex initiative that in order to manage it, people have to draw the picture of what they are supposed to do?"
"I don't understand," she replies.
"Some block diagram of the various steps that must be accomplished in order to achieve the objective, showing which steps should be done in sequence and which in parallel. Or alternatively, some time charts, which display when each step should start and when it will end. If you came across a situation where people use such charts, you came across a project."
"I see," she says.
"Are you involved in projects?" I ask her.
"According to your definition, I am," she answers. "I am a brand manager, and we spend a lot of time building such charts before we launch a new product."
"And your name is?"
"Ruth Emerson."
Her example probably helps the others because it quickly becomes apparent that everybody is involved with some type of project. Some of them are working in an almost pure project environment, like Mark in design engineering, redheaded Ted in construction or Charlie, in the Hawaiian shirt, who told us he is in software