The importance of management

A brief story about management tools

I remember like it was yesterday the first thing my teacher said on the first day of my Project Management MBA. "Do you guys know that around 80% of the planned projects fail to achieve their goals?"

Then I thought to myself a couple of things: "OMG, probably this is much harder than I thought!" but also "How can it be so high with all the information and technology we have today?" and the second one combined with some experience brought many ideas and features that you can see now and will see in the future in our apps.

Before anything, I think it is important to go back just a bit and understand what is a project. Well, the Oxford dictionary explains it this way: "an individual or collaborative enterprise that is carefully planned to achieve a particular aim". That was a simple way to put it, but I still prefer this one: "A project is a set of tasks that must be completed in order to arrive at a particular goal or outcome".

Ok, so in theory project is, we plan tasks in order to achieve something. And what about management? Well, management is the how for our what (tasks=project) and on top of that there is the why to finish the famous golden circle but this is a topic for another day.

Now let's focus on how (management), to do the how with success we need tools and for me, the best one is called "PDCA". I have used it many times and never failed me, let me explain this acronym in a simple way. For any project, we need to sit and PLAN every step in advance applying the three resources (financial, human and time) that we need in every task. Then, DO the task, not a lot to explain. While doing or in some cases after, CONTROL that means making sure it is being done properly and on time. To finish, ACT, this part is important to achieve continuous improvement, it means reviewing all the good and bad things that happened to the project to update our lessons learned book.

While I am posting this article our apps can offer a few of those tools to improve your management and make sure the project is a success. We can help with the PLAN with a simple design where you can add tasks and who is involved with it, when it needs to start and finish and add comments to help your team to understand what needs to be done. Well, we can't help DO the task for you, for now, but maybe in the future on few occasions with an integrated AI in our apps. CONTROL everything with a modern calendar and notifications on time. ACT unfortunately we don't have the tools yet but it is in our plans to implement it.

To resume, management is important because it give us a clear path meanwhile preventing us from making mistakes and for that we use different tools to make sure everyone is on the same page and ready for the challenges because they will come.

Thanks for reading and I hope you can achieve a bit more.