|
Sponsered links:
|
|
Business coaching takes a lot of its core metaphors from the world of sports and competition. After all, running a business is, in many ways, the ultimate in competitive exercises, and managing your assets and employees is a lot like coaching a team of your own.
Like most other endeavors in life, project management-type thinking can really help, and there are lots of lessons from sports that you can take with you into project management training, on teamwork, planning, and the limits of planning.
In football, a lot of time is spent studying offensive game footage of opposing players. Doing this gives information on tendencies, on an individual basis, that will let you predict which way a running back will break on a play, how a receiver runs 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 team; the same applies to project management and market research for your business.
Studying what your competitors are doing in your market niche is critical for figuring out how to make complementary products, or position your products and services as a viable alternative. Look for tendencies, like when they purchase advertising and what sorts of ads they purchase. When you look at your competitor’s ads, put on your project manager hat, and try to reverse engineer the process 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 product development cycle. In this way, you’re using project management techniques as a "defensive coordinator", trying to anticipate the offensive moves your competitor will make.
To study individual players, look for who the advertising is targeted at. Ask yourself if that ad would work for you, for your customers, or for a group of customers 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 sporting event, a good project manager has to be alert to the mistakes – the missed blocks and failed executions – of his opponent. Plus, you can learn from others mistakes this way, which is always less costly than making your own.)
Now that you’ve taken a "defensive coordinator’s" perspective, it’s time to switch to offense. You’ve identified the weak areas in the market. Now it’s time to look at isolating elements that can hinder your plans. Using the information you gained from publicly available sources, try and gauge when your opposition is going to throw a new product release out; based on what kinds of products they produce, this may have a seasonal aspect to it. In particular, look for new versions of existing packages; particularly in the desktop application field, there’s a general 18-month to two year release cycle. If you’ve got a new product coming out that has existing competition, you want to time your release at the hypothetical point in time where the customers using competing products have learned all the features and are requesting more.
In sports, an offensive coordinator does phase two project management. The goals have been set, now it’s time to practice, practice, practice and make sure that your team is prepared to execute your plan, and your vision. This means training, and repetition on the practice field; running a football play is very much a series of coordinated actions – everyone has to be at the right place at the right time; the Walsh offense in professional football is the epitome of this; it relies on a quarterback who can survey the entire field quickly, and go through programmed "reads" of where his flanker, slot and center receivers are, 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 to seconds after the snap, and the quarterback is relying on his offensive linemen to buy him time to make his reads, and to buy his receivers time to get farther down field.
In less time than it takes to read "OK, slot one – covered, slot two covered, flanker, covered, to the tight end over the middle. Dump it." a quarterback has to gather the information, make the decision, and avoid being flattened by a 300-pound defensive end or 250 pound line backer. Making sure that a quarterback can gather this information, and make the decisions is prime project management as related to managing your personnel. You have to give them the skills and the judgment to gather information about the business, and give them pre-programmed sets of options that they can choose from when circumstances demand a decision now, rather than later…and if that sounds like training up your negotiators and sales reps to "make the call" on a sale, it should – it’s the same sort of skill. It just involves money rather than 300-pound men charging after you to do bodily harm.
One thing that coaches can do that doesn’t work as well for business in project management contexts, is concealment of intent and plans. In sports, considerable energy is spent on making a defensive package or offensive package look different from what it actually is. For example, if you know that the offense is going to run the ball, it’s worth it to bring eight men up to the line of scrimmage to stuff the run. If the offense is likely to throw the ball, you drop into a zone coverage package, or you try to hurry the passer with down linemen charging the quarterback; this puts a premium on the offense to conceal the nature of the play as much as possible, to try to get the defenders to hesitate on their plans in reaction to your formation. Likewise, on the defensive size of the ball, it’s worth it to conceal a blitz with zone coverage packages (or zone-blitz packages as they’re called), so that the quarterback’s last second play adjustments can be turned awry. While this sort of thing has some application in business, and it’s a useful thought exercise (following Napoleon’s mantra of "Several times a day, I ask myself "What would I do if the enemy appeared in an unexpected place?"), it doesn’t work as well in business because the rules of engagement are more wide open.
Look here for More project management training articles or for an extensive directory on related sites on: project management training.
|