A Project Manager’s Thanksgiving

Everyone is a project manager. Whether they know it or not, or if they don’t know the names of the common things one does managing work, it is project management. Let’s look at the typical Thanksgiving holiday meal.

Planning

Whether you do it formally or not, there is some form of menu planning. Let’s assume that Turkey is a given. What other things should be served alongside it, and how should those things taste, appear, etc.

Design Validation

Once you have your menu planned, you typically run it by your family and/or guests to give them an opportunity to chime in. What you are doing is basically having the stakeholders approve your plan/design. It’s part of stakeholder management, as well as a key part of the SDLC processes.

In this phase, you certainly want to identify any special diet needs, such as vegetarianism or veganism, or religious/ethnic constraints, like kosher, etc. as well as just plain “picky eaters”.

This also falls under the category of risk management. In thinking through the various things that can come up, which you don’t know about now, and which would have a huge impact on the success of your meal — that is risk management.

At the end of this stage, you would feed the things you uncover here back into your menu plan. You add dishes, remove, or pick different preparation methods, cooking methods, and what you plan to buy.

If you have uncovered dietary constraints like vegetarian/vegan, you must plan and communicate how you intend to prepare and serve those guests. Because it will potentially impact your entire cooking plan. For example, you need to keep stirring utensils segregated, e.g. not stir with a spoon but just stirred a dish that has meat or animal by-products.

Procurement

You may need to place an order at a market to reserve a bird or have one shipped to your home, or you just go buy what is available at the market. And if you are buying frozen, hopefully, that isn’t the day of or the night before. Because it takes time to thaw properly.

Aside from the bird, we break down all the dishes we have planned into a shopping list of ingredients. At this point, you have your menu plan, specific dishes and recipes, and you have had your stakeholders chime in and identify any things you might have missed.

You also need to think about materials, and cookware, like cheesecloth, twine, turkey baster, injection kit, etc.

Execution Planning

Next, you give thought to specifically how you are going to prepare everything so that everything comes out at basically the same time. How, specifically, are you going to sequence your work so that things aren’t made too far in advance, or avoid having the bird come out too soon.

You want to give thought to what cookware you will use, what burners, etc. to make sure you can prepare everything in the right sequence so that when the bird is done and ready to serve, everything else is too. It’s easy to say, not so easy to do.

You also have to think about the oven and its configuration and time sharing. For example, I make candied yams from sweet potatoes (not canned), and I need to bake them for about 30 minutes. Further, that needs to be done at a time after the bird is in.

You have to give thought to the entire process, and how you will achieve it without looking like you are unorganized — especially with your family watching and guests arriving at the “fun” part. By that, I mean the most critical time from your perspective — as you have the bird ready to come out of the oven and all the sides are cooking right now.

What I just described, has a few names. It’s work planning/work breakdown. Its dependency and task sequencing. Moreover, it boils down to “production cut-over”, doesn’t it? You don’t want the work, which some of it has to be done in front of your stakeholders, to reflect on you as disorganized, etc.

Execution

Next, you sit back and execute according to your plan. Because you made a good plan, which you never wrote down, you know what things you can make a few days before (such as bread), the day or night before (pies), and what time you need to start prep work and specifically what times you need to start each major dish.

Ah, I mentioned prep. What is that? Well, that is when you transform the ingredients you bought into the form they need to be for the recipes you will cook. It’s cutting/dicing onions, carrots, celery, etc. Just like in a professional kitchen, you want to do your prep work first, all at once, so your time is maximized. The less you have to do in the final phase, the better, right?

Project Management

At the time of this writing, the project management industry says there are ten (10) areas where project management activities happen:

• Integration Management – Your menu planning and design
• Scope Management – Your menu: each dish is a product of the project, and all your stakeholders know what to expect.
• Time Management – Your planning on the detailed preparations and cooking sequences.
• Cost Management – Once you knew how many people you need to plan on feeding, and what dishes you selected, this defined your budget. Of course, you didn’t forget to include wines and liquors, table decorations, etc. right?
• Quality Management – Your entire meal plan and preparation were designed with quality from the ground up.
• Resource Management – Your ingredients list became project resources that you managed, and also and you gave thought to oven time-sharing, and how to get everything done with only 4 burners and the pots/pans you have.
• Communications Management – You communicated up front with your stakeholders on what to expect and gave them the opportunity to chime in. This is communications and stakeholder management.
• Risk Management – You built risk management into the entire plan. From polling your stakeholders for any special requirements or requests. Hopefully, you also thought about things like “what would I do if my oven wouldn’t light?” or “what if I burn the bird?” If you pondered possibilities like that, then you definitely did risk management.
• Procurement Management – You may not have really done much here, but buying everything you need from a market IS procuring and you DID manage it. But, if you knew to get your bird from this best place, and knew you had to put an order in advance, etc. then you did a little more procurement management. And if you pondered “what would I do if I show up and they say my order is missing?”, then you also did more risk management.
• Stakeholder Management – You did stakeholder management throughout the process, level setting the stakeholders on the menu, giving them a chance to chime in, you asked about special needs or requirements. When a stakeholder arrives at your door at 3:00pm and dismays “where are the marshmallows? You HAVE TO HAVE MARSHMALLOWS FOR THANKSGIVING”. In that case, I hope you can say “to be fair, I did ask for requirements or requests and this did not come up.”

Conclusion

I really did not write this article to poke fun at or minimize what good project managers do. Rather, I am trying to show that project management is everywhere, even if we don’t see it. Any time a complex undertaking is carried out to produce some significant thing, a project has happened. Ok, I cheated and I left off the “unique” word in the definition of a project. In my view, significant undertakings which happen to reoccur are still projects.