Project Management Training and the Principles of Sports

Business coaching takes a lot of its fundamental similes from the world of sports and contest. After all, running a business is, in many ways, the ultimate in competitive exercises and managing your resources and workforce is a lot like coaching players of your own.

Like most other enterprises in existence, project management-type thinking can help in reality, and there are lots of examples from sports that you can take with you into project management training, on teamwork, planning, and the restrictions of preparation.

In football, a lot of time is spent studying offensive game record of rival players. Doing this gives information on tendencies, on an individual basis, that will let you foresee which way a running back will break on a play, how a receiver rushes their routes, whether or not a given offensive lineman can be made to bite on a hip break, or if a running back is better able to break tackles going left or right. With enough study, you can reconstruct some of the play-book used by the opposing squad; the same applies to project management and market exploration for your enterprise. Studying what the competition are doing in your market place is essential for figuring out how to make complementary merchandise, or place your merchandise and services as a doable option. Look for drifts, like when they buy advertising and what sorts of adverts they buy. When you look at your competitor's adverts, put on your project manager cap, and try to retrace the method they took to make that commercial - look at when the commercial appeared, look at the creation time for the commercial to find it's assembly date, and then look back from there (as all project managers do), going back in time; with this you can even make a decent gauge on your competitor's product development phase. In this way, you're using project management techniques as a 'defensive coordinator', trying to anticipate the offensive actions your adversary will make.

To study personal players, look for who the advertising is targeted at. Ask yourself if that ad would work for you, for your clientele, or for a part of clientele you'd like to reach. Then ask yourself why the ad works in those contexts (or, more importantly, if it doesn't, why it doesn't. Like any coach in a game, a good project manager has to be alert to the mistakes - the missed blocks and failed executions - of his rival. Plus, you can learn from other's faults this way, which is always less expensive than making your own.)

Now that you've taken a 'defensive coordinator's' view, it's time to change to the offense. You've identified the weak areas in the market. Now it's time to look at isolated elements that can hinder your campaign. Using the information you gained from openly free sources, try to judge when your opposition is going to issue a new product release; based on what sort of merchandise they manufacture, this may have a periodical characteristic to it. In particular, look for new upgrades of existing applications; particularly in the desktop application area, there's a general one and a half year to two year release stage. If you've got a new manufactured good coming out that has dynamic competition, you want to calculate your release at the supposed point in time where the consumers using rival merchandise have learned all the features and are calling formore.

In sports, an offensive manager does phase two project management. The objectives have been set, now it's time to practice, practice, practice and make sure that your team is prepared to perform your strategy, and your idea. This means exercising, and putting into practice on the field; running a football play is very much a runs of coordinated feat - everyone has to be at the right spot at the right time; the Walsh offense in professional football is the essence of this; its proficiency relies on a quarterback who can analyse the entire field quickly, and go through programmed 'reads' of where his flanker, slot and center receivers are, while being conscious that his outlet receivers at tight end and running back are on hand for a shorter pass. While this seems cerebral, and strangely calm to read, it's all being executed in about three seconds after the snap, and the quarterback is relying on his offensive linemen to create time to make his reads, and to give his receivers more time to get farther down the field.

'OK, hole one - covered, hole two covered, flanker covered, to the tight end over the middle. Dump it.'; in less time than it takes to read this a quarterback has to collect the data, make the decision, and avoid being squashed by a 300-pound defensive end or 250 pound line backer. Making sure that a quarterback can gather this data, and make the right assessments is prime project management as related to managing your workers. You have to give them the skills and the judgment to assemble information about the commerce, and give them pre-programmed sets of options that they can choose from when conditions demand a decision now, rather than later!and if that sounds like training up your negotiators and sales agents to 'make the call' on a deal, it should - it's the same sort of proficiency. It just requires money rather than 300-pound men charging after you to do physical damage.

One thing that coaches are able to do that doesn't perform as well for business in project management situations, is concealment of intent and strategy. In sports, significant energy is spent on making a defensive or offensive package look distinct from what it in fact is. For instance, if you know that the offense is going to run the ball, it's worth to bring eight men up to the line of scrimmage to stuff the run. If the offense is likely to throw the football, you drop into a zone coverage defense, or you try to rush the passer with down linemen charging the quarterback; this puts the best on the offense to mask their intended play as much as possible, and to get the offense team to hesitate on their strategy in reaction to your formation. Likewise, on the defensive part of the ball, it's worth to conceal a blitz with zone coverage packages (or zone-blitz packages as they're called), so that the quarterback's last second play changes can be turned skewed. While this sort of thing has some function in business, and it's a useful thought training (following Napoleon's mantra of 'Numerous times a day, I ask myself 'What would I do if the rival appeared in an unforeseen spot?'), it doesn't run as well in business because the rules of engagement are more extensive.

More resources on using sports philosophy in project management training

- George Purdy