Masonry Magazine May 2006 Page. 52
Full Contact Project Management
FULL CONTACT
Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory!
Gary Micheloni
I'm probably a lot like you: all day long I work pretty darn hard, doing the best I can to represent the company's interests. In my case, it's as a project manager. You may also be a PM, or maybe you're a president, a superintendent, or someone who performs any of the other skills needed to make our industry function. No matter the position, I'm willing to bet that you work pretty darn hard yourself.
Sometimes when I leave work and come home, I just want to relax. Know the feeling? Forget about all of that company stuff for an hour or two. That was my plan a couple of nights ago. And what could take my mind off of project management better than a simple game of basketball? Again, that was my plan, but was I ever wrong!
The "simple" basketball game with the profound PM lesson just happened to be part of the NCAA tournament, lovingly known as "March Madness." And it was a friendly game between UCLA and Gonzaga, two schools with terrific basketball traditions-traditions that should have kept my mind far away from Full Contact Project Management! Wrong again!
By now, you are probably checking the cover of the magazine (yep, it's Masonry, all right), wondering if you had picked up the sports page by mistake. Rest assured, you haven't. And there is a tremendous PM lesson coming your way courtesy of a sporting event played out in front of Coach Gary.
Gonzaga started strong and had UCLA down by 17 points in the first half, although UCLA closed to about a dozen by halftime. The second half continued as a mirror image of the first. With about five minutes left in the game, Gonzaga was still up by about ten, and I was pretty excited as my "Zags took it to the Bruins. And then it happened: Gonzaga stopped playing a winning game with lots of offense and instead reverted to the "prevent defense," or so it seemed to me. We'll leave that game for a moment to discuss this point.
Much has been written over the years regarding the "prevent defense" strategy, much of it unkind. Someone once offered a truism, which has been oft-repeated: "The only thing a prevent defense does is prevent you from winning"
PROJECT MANAGEMENT
If you're any kind of a football fan, you have probably witnessed a game or two where a team has given away a game that it had practically already won. How? They stopped doing what worked. Stopped doing what it takes to win. Stopped pressing their offense to score again. Instead, they focused on how to hang on to their lead. For the purpose of today's exercise, I hope that you have personally witnessed such a game. If the losing team was yours, it was probably a painful loss and you will most likely never forget it. Good!
The worst football game I ever attended was my San Diego State Aztecs against the BYU Cougars. It was a huge game- Thursday night national television audience and a championship at stake. The Aztecs were up by 28 points at the half. By the time that game ended, BYU came back and the final score was 52-52. Ouch! My wife and I, along with most of the people in the stadium, just sat there stunned. A chance at greatness had slipped away. All of that work, building up that lead, came to nothing. The game might as well have never been played.
What about you? What was your worst game? What stopped working? What certain victory was given away? It could even have been baseball or golf, or even a project where you didn't give 100 percent. I'll let you ponder that.
The reason I wanted to bring this to your attention is because of the obvious lesson-the connection to our daily lives, and particularly to our work. And please don't mistake the message. I am not preaching against playing defense- quite the contrary. The Full Contact PM approach to defense is alarmingly simple: have a great one. Play to win; don't
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Masonry May 2006