Whether we like it or not we all spend our lives managing projects. From organising the weekly food shopping to moving house, we live through a series of activities that usually conglomerate into groups with some overall identifiable aim in mind. I call these projects.
If there is no particular aim in mind then you are probably just filling time.
If you think that the food shopping does not constitute a project: just ask someone who has done this with three children under six or someone who is preparing their first dinner party.
There is an urban myth that men need projects to do anything in their lives, except perhaps sex. Ask a man to put up a shelf and he will either build a wardrobe or strip all the plaster from the wall. It is fairly unlikely that you will end up with a shelf. Ask a man to change a light bulb and he will either fuse everything or spend the weekend rewiring the computer room.
Perhaps Columbus was a project man? Did he just set out to get together with a few friends to go sailing for the weekend? Was Edmund Hilary’s real aim to go for a stroll and get a newspaper? I don’t agree with projects being things men do and women don’t. I just think men make more of them. Baking a Victoria sponge is a project, and it is one I have abjectly failed at, more than once.
On big projects that require hard work, women do tend to get involved more at the planning stage. Statements such as ‘we should have a new patio in the garden’ has many layers of meaning about who will be choosing tiles and who will be mixing cement and laying them.
Whatever the nature of the project if it involves more than one person it has a 50% chance of failure; three people 75% and I am sure you can extrapolate the maths to work out why 27 people crowded round a project meeting table is not usually a recipe for success. The commonest problem is not a lack of skill, enthusiasm or money. It is a lack of good communication. Do any two people in the project have the same idea of what it is; where it is or when it will be completed?
We have all seen the look on the face of our nearest and dearest which says, ‘that wasn’t what I meant’. If we are lucky it has been followed by one that says, ‘but I still love you’.
If two people can get it wrong, just think how wrong a larger group can get it. I have a technological solution to this…
Have you ever been served in a restaurant by a smart young waiter or waitress who listens to your requirements and then walks over to an equally smart looking till and punches in your order? What do your think your chances are of everything turning up as you wanted? For an answer see the maths paragraph above, substituting number of items for number of people. Two cups of coffee, maybe: three course meal, slim chance.
My technological solution is called paper and pen, or pencil or laptop or something that allows information to be recorded. The information must then be fed back to everyone else, quickly and potentially they should be asked to confirm receipt and agreement. I call this communication.
And in my local Indian restaurant they take the order, write it down and read it back to you – and, you guessed it, still deliver something else to the table.