For company and people, the best approach for a big success is to accumulate many small successes. I concluded the same for a project after the successes of many Lean Six Sigma projects. A big project can be decomposed to many small projects. People can easily gain their experience and knowledge in Lean Six Sigma through the small projects, and accumulating the small successes becomes a big success of the company.
But, the project needs a discipline to success.
I asked my colleague the reason why he always say “I am busy, I am busy”, and his answer was that he had a lot of projects to do, and showed me his ToDo list.
He was not a project manager and should not have many projects to be involved. So I wondered why he had so many projects. I looked his ToDo list, then I figured out that he was busy with a lot of tasks, not projects.
He was swayed by the tasks with neither a goal, purpose nor an idea of his contribution to the company. It was unfortunate for him as well as the company.
What is a difference between a project and a task? A project has a clear goal to achieve. A project defines a start point and an end point, and there are steps between the start point and the end point to achieve the goal. A project has a schedule which aligns the steps. A project has metrics to measure the achievements. A project has constraints on budget, time and other resource.
A task is a step between the start point and the end point of a project. Tasks for a day are the aligned tasks with the project schedule (A daily task includes a routine work). A ToDo list shows all tasks to do regardless scheduled or routine.
To increase the probability of project success and to keep the success, a comprehensive and robust project management methodology is needed. One of such project management methodology is defined in Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK) by Project Management Institute (PMI).
Another established project management methodology is Lean Six Sigma.
A difference between the PMBOK and Lean Six Sigma is “Hows”. The PMBOK defines the “Whats” needed in the project management, but a few of “Hows”. Defining “Hows” could be difficult by the PMBOK because all industries and companies are unique.
But the Lean Six Sigma defines “Hows” deeply such as how to create an organization, how to manage teams, how to use the Lean Six Sigma tools, so on. Probably the Lean Six Sigma puts more weights on “Hows”, and the training for Lean Six Sigma spends many hours on “Hows”. Although each industry and company is unique, the principles of Lean Six Sigma approach is pretty consistent.
In other words, The PMBOK says “you need these things for project success”, and the Lean Six Sigma says that “you need to do these actions for project success”. Defining a framework or a way of thinking for project success is the common idea in both project management methodologies.
The task-oriented people seem to have no framework for their jobs. Their schedule and goals (i.e., quality, productivity, customer satisfaction) look unclear. They are just busy with their daily tasks.
The project-oriented people on other hands have the framework for their jobs. They use the PMBOK or the Lean Six Sigma with knowing the schedule, the goals, and the constraints.
I believe that any given job can be replaced with a project (or a task in a project), and selecting a right framework and applying the selected framework to the project must increase the probability of project success.