Project Management & Your Life
Life is one big project. The people in your life are your coworkers. Your daily tasks test your problem-solving skills. You present your findings from these tasks to your friends and family. Then they give their opinions on how you can improve (most often, whether you like it or not).
You may have more experience with project management than you think. It’s, also, the essence of business, so why not learn the proper terms?
Here’s our list with important terms and how to relate them to daily life:
Baseline
It’s your starting point. You compare your results throughout the campaign back to it. Basically, it is the base in which you measure your project’s performance.
- Think of schooling. Each year you learn more. Whether it’s about people or academia, you’re learning something to build on what you knew before. If you took a pre-test at the beginning of the year, you could gauge how well you’re doing with recent tests and classwork.
- Set up points in a calendar to divvy out specific goals. Make sure the goals align with the master objective(s).
Contingency Plan
This is the backup plan you have in place if Plan A doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to.
- Small children do this when they are trying to get something they want. If begging doesn’t work, they might plan to bargain or bribe. If a kid wants something urgently, they will continue to make plans until they get what they want (or give up).
- To be a great at project management, you must anticipate problems and plan for them early!
Milestones
These are the points in your project that track your progress. Many times, dates are set for certain milestones to happen.
- Birthdays are a great example of this. Certain years came with special privileges. When you turn 13, you are officially a teenager with the ability to rebel against the times. At the age of the 21, you are legally able to drink (at least in the U.S.).
- Milestones require a similar type of thinking, but you have to physically make them yourself. Know what you want accomplished at which date.
Risk Management
The problems that could affect your project and how you cope with them. It’s a pretty simple concept but detecting each and every one is the tricky part.
- When going into a new relationship with a person, whether friendly, romantically, or professionally, you often evaluate what could go wrong because of certain actions. Using the right language is crucial (we talk about this concept in our post about conversationality). You have to know how to manage yourself in case the unexpected pops up. You probably shouldn’t tell your new boss they look terrible with that haircut. If you have an argument with your friend, you have to know the way to make back up with them. It’s all about how you approach each issue.
- Risks can be anything from a system outage to a debacle between team members. You just have to be prepared to handle what pops up.
Triple Constant
There are 3 aspects that determine quality:
- Cost – the budget you have for the project
- Scope – the resources at your disposal (i.e. people, equipment, systems)
- Time – the time constraints on the project
The bigger any of the constraints, the bigger the triangle gets. Thus, the higher quality of your project.
- When you do any sort of crafting, no matter what the medium, you must make some sort of plan. I will take this from a knitter’s perspective, but the concepts can be substituted! The yarn costs 50$. Does that fit in your budget? Will your 7-year-old 10 mm needles work, or will you need to buy another pair? When will you need this done? Is your friend’s birthday coming up in a week or a month?
- Whatever the project, you need to know what is at your disposal and what you lack. Strategically debating each of the constraints will make sure you end up with the desired result.
Conclusion
There are many crucial terms to project management, but this will help anyone gain a fresh perspective. Projects come and go in life, so approach them efficiently and effectively!
Now go crush it!
🎉Fun Fact: This was inspired by a social media post we posted on our Instagram. Check out @nextcoremedia for more infographics and marketing, business, and life hacks!
Read Part 2 Here!
