Few days ago a thought hit my mind about the relationship between a project and a life, and I found both pretty much similar in so many aspects, in fact have been so busy trying to organize my life, feel purposeful, have SMART goals, be better time manager, and get things done. I found myself aware of managing projects but if life is just another project, so why am I not able to manage it the same way, or is it going to be part of Standish Group report! In this post I will propose an interesting analogy between a project and a life derived by passion to project management!

Life is unique, temporary, has start & finish date and limited resources to achieve objectives, but finish date is always unknown!

The above quote struck my mind, and as you may know this is the academic definition of a project, after some observation I found life and project are very similar but the only difference is that the life’s finish date is always unknown, nevertheless some projects also have no defined finish date, and so life and project are almost identical.

There is always a gap between a professional’s work life and personal/family life, while we tend to have a successful professional life by implementing best practices and seeking advices, on the contrary, most of us, if not all, don’t practice any of what we do on daily basis with our professional life, and here comes the gap, I believe that if a project manager starts to apply what he efficiently does with projects to his personal life, the life would be much better, like many of us practice Active Listening in meetings and we often pay attention when we get a business call, but in personal life, you can simply let your family members speak without paying any attention! We tend to establish good relationships in office to form the professional image we need to have for ourselves, but in personal life, we barely find enough time to keep in touch with important people in our life etc.

I have used my preferred Mind Mapping tool to brainstorm how a project manager can applies project management principals to his life, which would yield success in personal and family life

My Life, My Project

I am done with the mindmap, in fact I was writing the post and then stopped writing and started working on the mindmap, I did not go very deep to define each and every aspect of life, I just tried to prototype the idea, being a Top-Down guy, I like to draw the broad lines first and then work on details, rather than doing small activities that may not contribute to the vision and goals I have drawn to myself, as you can see above I started by defining the vision which can be a very brief statement but it has to be strong enough to keep you going, so every time you will remember it, you will get energized and motivated to keep moving towards your vision, for example I have added the vision statement as “I want to be happy and successful”, look at “I” it represents ownership, you do not necessarily have to have the same vision statement, this is just an example and you can have quite different one, after have decided the vision statement, I started working on goals and objectives, you will see some people mix between goals and objectives, in a nutshell goals are broad while objectives are specific, objectives have to be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time Bound), for example a the first goal stated above (order does not imply importance, again it is just an example), I Want to Be a Project Manager, then under this goal I identified some SMART objectives such as Get PMP certified in 5 Months, this can be considered a SMART objective, I said I need to get PMP certified for example I could have said Get Project Management Certificated, and this could be PMP or PRINCE2, it is Measurable the only factor to be measured against is either pass or fail the PMP exam, it is Achievable as many people get PMP certified and they pass the exam from the first try, it is Realistic because 5 months is not a short period, on the other hand if I said in 5 days it would be an impossible to achieve! And it is Time Bound because I have added a time frame in which the objective has to be achieved, this is a SMART objective! Second objective I identified was Register in at least 10 leading project management communities in 2 weeks time, I will leave this one so you can decide whether it is SMART or not.

Next step is to prioritize the goals and objectives, obviously you will never be able to do everything at the same time, remember that we speak about a life here, and you have to phase your goals like you do with a big project, I also thought it would be unfair to analogize a project and a life, and it would make more sense to treat life as a program (collection of related projects) where you are the Program Manager, the program would have a vision and you work on multiple projects either sequentially or simultaneously to make the vision come true.

Prioritization itself is an art, imagine yourself throwing multiple balls at the air at the same time, it is very likely one or two balls will fall and this is where you will have setbacks and encounter failure! In order to prioritize you need to have a set of driving factors, such as time, resources, risk , cost, and whether the project/activity is supporting your vision or not, it pretty much like portfolio management! For instance you may consider getting PMP certificate that requires 2 hours a day (time), $5,000 for training and exam fees (cost) while the activity seems feasible, you may defer the whole thing due to being so busy with work and you may not find enough time to study.

Life Charter

Here I am really getting gaga, I am quite sure you realize the importance of a project charter to both the project and the project manager, it establishes the project and define purpose and success criteria. I believe the same applies to life project as well, imagine yourself having a goal and you live towards this goal, imagine if you charter this goal, you will open your preferred word processor software and start writing down the goal and SMART objectives, and after you have finished it you print ( colour not black & white ) three copies keep one in your drawer or safe, one in your wallet, third you can stick it on the most visible wall in your room. Imagine if you read it everyday, I believe this way you will always energized and you will never forget what you have committed yourself to, on the flipside, I think if we do that with projects, project will always succeed! I like to call the project charter as the certificate of birth of the project.

Quality & Time

Quality of life depends on the goals you have set yourself, however the quality will always differ based on each endeavour you will take, for time this will be drawn of the phases you have identified in the first step, and ideally you will need to have yearly, monthly, and weekly goals that will derive your yearly, monthly, and weekly plans.

Risks

In this process, you can identify a lifetime’s risks and endeavour’s risk, the process is similar to the common risk process (plan, identify, analyze, respond, control), in the mindmap I identified a few categories such as: Career, Health, and Money these categories can be extended and may not be applicable to your case, however these categories are general to most of people, we all care about Health that consists of Physical and Mental, we also care about career aspirations and stability, and financial stability, you will need to follow the Risk Management Process to manage risks, you should also consider positive risks (aka opportunities) you can read my article SEE Positive Risks.

Resources

Each and every person has limited resources, through which his life is running, resources can be material or intellectual, I could identify a few categories such as:

• Health: includes physical and mental, I see both very tightly coupled and personally I believe that positive attitude is one of the top-notch attributes a successful person can have
• Wealth & Skills: Fixed assets and intellectual properties, no one is born successful, while some people are born wealthy, but success is different than wealth, you need to understand that you are the only one who can set your own boundaries, and if you wish you can break all the boundaries, you need to always work on your skills and continuously develop the ones that need improvement, follow Kaizen !
• IQ & EQ: Read my article Why Projects Fail – Part Three

Recap

That was just a sneak peak of what is spinning in my head, I personally believe our life would be much more better of we deal it as a project, if you liked the idea and the approach, please leave a comment and re-tweet!

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