Through the years I have seen many people who use Microsoft Project (aka project management software) and claim they are project managers, I have also seen PMP certified people who don’t know the basics of Microsoft Project, and sadly I have seen project managers who are managing projects and don’t know the theory nor the software!

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!

Why project managers tend to always see negative risks? Most of projects managers prefer to focus only on threats rather than opportunities, you need to ask yourself when was the last time you added a positive risk in your risk registry? if you do not remember then it is time to change this pessimist attitude we, project managers, tend to take while identifying risks, this will definitely add more value to your project.

PERT is a technique to depict project activities and to calculate duration of each activity keeping uncertainty/risk in mind, PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique) was first develop in fifties (1950s), as a method to estimate activity duration, it is often referred to as PERT Chart, PERT uses indeterministic methodology to calculate duration, by trying to anticipate three estimates, worst case scenario represented by pessimistic value or longest duration an activity will take to finish, best case scenario represented by optimistic value or shortest duration an activity will take to finish, third factor is the most likely estimate, the 3 factors feed into a formula which takes probability into consideration to calculate the duration of the activity, the formula is: