Project Management Training And Sports

Business coaching takes a lot of its basic metaphors from the world of sports and competition. After all, running a business is, in many ways, the ultimate in competitive trainings and managing your resources and workers is a lot like coaching players of your own.

Like most other endeavors in life, 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, development, and the limits of development.

In football, a lot of time is spent studying offensive game recording of rival competitors. Doing this gives information on trends, on an individual footing, that will let you expect which way a running back will make a move, how a receiver runs their courses, 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 block tackles going left or right. With enough research, you can rebuild some of the play-book used by the opposing team; the same applies to project management and market analysis for your commerce. Studying what your opponents are doing in your market place is crucial for figuring out how to make complementary products, or place your products and services as a viable substitute. Look for trends, like when they acquire advertising and what type of advertisements they acquire. When you look at your competitor’s advertisements, put on your project manager bonnet, and try to reverse engineer the method they took to make that ad - look at when the ad appeared, look at the production time for the ad to find it’s submission 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 merchandise development cycle. In this way, you’re using project management methods as a ‘defensive coordinator’, trying to foresee the offensive actions your opponent will make.

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

Now that you’ve taken a ‘defensive coordinator’s’ viewpoint, it’s time to change to the offense. You’ve identified the frail regions in the market. Now it’s time to look at isolated aspects that can hinder your tactics. Using the info you gained from in public free resources, try to judge when your opposition is going to throw out a new product release; based on what sort of products they manufacture, this may have a periodical aspect to it. In particular, look for new upgrades of existing applications; particularly in the desktop application area, there’s a general 18-month to two year release phase. If you’ve got a new manufactured good coming out that has dynamic competition, you want to time your release at the hypothetical point in time where the consumers using rival products have learned all the qualities and are requestingmore.

In sports, an offensive coordinator does phase two project management. The goals have been set, now it’s time to exercise, exercise, exercise and make certain that your team is prepared to execute your scheme, and your vision. This means exercising, and putting into practice on the field; running a football play is very much a sequences of coordinated actions - everyone has to be at the right place at the right time; the Walsh offense in professional football is the embodiment of this; its ability relies on a quarterback who can analyse the entire field quickly, and go through automated ‘reads’ of the positions of his flanker, slot and center receivers, while being aware that his outlet receivers at tight end and running back are available for a shorter pass. While this sounds cerebral, and oddly calm to read, it’s all being done 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 certain 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 proficiencies and the judgment to collect info about the commerce, and give them pre-programmed series of preferences that they can choose from when circumstances demand a choice now, rather than later!and if that sounds like training up your negotiators and sales reps to ‘make the call’ on a deal, it should - it’s the same type of skill. It just engrosses money rather than 300-pound men storming 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 contexts, is concealment of purpose and strategy. In sports, significant energy is spent on making a defensive or offensive team look different from what it in fact is. For example, 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 covering defense, or you try to hurry the passer with down linemen storming the quarterback; this puts a premium on the offense to hide the nature of the play as much as possible, and to get the offense team to delay on their tactics in response to your formation. Similarly, on the defensive side of the ball, it’s worth to conceal a blitz with zone covering packages (they’re called zone-blitz packages), so that the quarterback’s last second play corrections can be turned skewed. While this sort of thing has some application in business, and it’s a helpful thought training (following Napoleon’s mantra of ‘Numerous times a day, I ask myself ‘What would I do if the enemy appeared in an unforeseen place?’), it doesn’t run as well in business because the rules of engagement are more wide open.

More resources on project management training and the similarities with sports

- George Purdy