Lunch Conference

I attended a lunch conference yesterday for the PMI chapter. This is for people who are members of PMI (Project Management Institute) and have earned their PMP (Project Management Professional). The conferences are once a month and have great food and a speaker. You get to sit with other PMP’s from other companies around the northern part of the state. The speaker was speaking about what he does for his job. He basically rescues failing or troubled projects. So he creates another project to oversee the failing project. To be honest a lot of the speakers are boring. I was kind of interested in hearing about how he did this because I was wondering how many projects to you create to oversee a failing project, what if the overseeing project starts to fail? Do you create another project? J Well, the reason I am telling everyone about my boring day is because he told a story that I could relate to at the end of his session. In this story he wanted to give an example about what his company does to rescue these projects. I found the story really funny and cute.

He said, “I was teaching my daughter how to do the dishes, so we created a project. I taught her about the tools that are needed to do the dishes. The water needs to be warm, you put the soap in this side and warm water in the other side. You can put the dishes that are clean over here. You will need a towel to dry the dishes before they are put away. You need something to scrub the dishes with. We talked about technique on scrubbing the dishes. We also talked about the pressure that was needed on each type of the dishes that she would see as they came through to get cleaned. We talked about the time line on getting the dishes finished and when the project ends, (when the dishes are put a way). She started doing the dishes and I checked on her and saw that a knife that was in the clean area was still dirty. Now this is where my company comes in. We analyze if we should terminate the failing project or rescue the project. I determined that the project needs to be rescued. I could just take over the project and finish the project as a success, but then the root company will not learn. Most Project Management books will also tell you to stop the project until you can fix it. If I stopped this project and pulled my daughter into my office and started over by talking about scrubbing techniques and about the correct tools I would lose the base of the original project (the suds would be gone and the water would be cold). I would have to start over. Instead I just observe. I watched her wash the dishes. She grabbed a pot and used the correct pressure and was able to clean that pot exactly how she should. I continued to watch her and each time she did a great job. Then she grabbed another knife, she was holding the knife wrong and wasn’t putting the pressure she needed to clean that knife. I asked her why she was holding the knife like that? She said that she was afraid the knife was going to cut her. So we stopped doing the dishes and I taught her different ways to hold the knife so she wouldn’t get cut. Now the project missed its original deadline, but we found the root cause of the failing project and addressed the root cause.”

Now by this time in the conference everyone was laughing because of his example. I was really happy I went because I realized that I need to observe my kids more instead of taking over the “projects”. I am glad that some of the speakers show their human side, it makes it less boring.