The importance of management

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 planned projects fail to achieve their goals?"

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

Before anything else, I think it’s important to go back a bit and understand what a project is. The Oxford Dictionary defines it as "an individual or collaborative enterprise that is carefully planned to achieve a particular aim." That’s 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."

So, in theory, a project is the what—we plan tasks in order to achieve something. And what about management? Well, management is the how behind our what (tasks = project). On top of that, there’s also the why, which completes the famous Golden Circle—but that’s a topic for another day.

Now let’s focus on the how (management). To do the how successfully, we need tools. For me, the best one is called PDCA. I’ve used it many times, and it has never failed me. Let me explain this acronym in a simple way:

• Plan – Sit down and plan every step in advance, applying the three key resources (financial, human, and time) to each task.

• Do – Execute the task. Straightforward, nothing much to explain.

• Control – While doing (or in some cases after), make sure the task is being done properly and on time.

• Act – This part is crucial for continuous improvement. Review all the good and bad things that happened during the project and update your lessons-learned book.

While I’m posting this article, our apps already offer some of these tools to improve your management and increase your chances of success:

• Plan – With a simple design, you can add tasks, assign people, set start and finish dates, and add comments to help your team understand what needs to be done.

• Do – Well, we can’t do the tasks for you (at least for now), but maybe in the future, with integrated AI, we’ll be able to help in some situations.

• Control – Keep track of everything with a modern calendar and timely notifications.

• Act – Unfortunately, we don’t have this tool yet, but it’s in our plans to implement it.

To sum up, management is important because it gives us a clear path while helping us prevent mistakes. 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 little more.