4 Lessons Hockey Has Taught Me About Project Management

April 16, 2021 - 5 min read

Joy Lawless

Here are some of the key lessons hockey has taught me about project management:

1. Hire Flexible Players

In hockey you have six players on the ice and three main positions: Forward, Defense, and Goalie. The goalie is the only one that should truly be a “specialist,” which means the other five players need to have some flexibility. If roles are too defined, teammates won't be as prepared to help out in a pinch. Even defense should be able to shoot the puck!

In the same way, I'm not going to wait for someone in QA to test a feature when I can do it myself. The aim for everyone on the project team is to be flexible enough to assist in scoring goals. If someone's background is in business project management, but they can also turn their hand to IT or creative project management, it will serve your organization amazingly in the long run. It's all for the team.

Also, keep an eye on recruiting. Trading players in hockey translates to talent acquisition in business. Veterans are vital for providing project stability, but as the game speeds up and new skills are needed, it’s important to make sure you have the right mix of players. (And this has nothing to do with age!)

2. Seek Guidance from Coaches

The bench holds your most important assets: coaches and assistants. No single person is the keeper of all playbook knowledge. In project management, you need to seek the wisdom of mentors, supervisors, other PMs, or even the library of resources you keep on your hard drive or behind your desk. Situational guidance is a wonderful tool and keeps your team on the winning side.

Above the bench, often peering from a skybox in the arena, are the stakeholders. Their roles and responsibilities can vary greatly from team to team, but they are always present and their input guides the team. Successfully hitting your milestones will feed their appetite for updates and also provides them with visible progress. Accountability is the name of the game!

3. Take 82 Steps to Victory

When a team finally makes it through the 82-game season schedule, it's a cause for celebration. Each of those games brought the team closer to the championship trophy. In project management, those victorious games translate to accomplished tasks -- each one leading to a completed project. And success!

With so many games, ideally all of your players have had a chance to shine. If you use the Agile methodology, your daily stand-up meetings come to mind. If you don't use Agile, think of the team meetings you (hopefully) already have scheduled. This is a chance for all players to show off their contribution to the overall project. And individual recognition is key, as it keeps things personal and makes sure you acknowledge your MVP.

4. Plan for the Finals in Stages

The road to the Stanley Cup is broken into three stages: the regular season, the playoffs, and the finals. Like any complete hockey season, your project has a beginning, middle, and end. A three-stage approach makes progress observable, with no extra work needed to understand where you stand as you advance to the championship.

Hockey coaches strategize for the games by reviewing past experiences. Project teams plan for each stage by breaking down the project into those 82 smaller tasks and distributing the load to all team members.

I personally like to give my projects three milestones, with the third being the big game, the final deadline. All tasks are then built out and linked to these milestones appropriately, via dependencies. Executives can view a report in terms of completed, active, and overdue milestones (which hopefully never happen).

So here's hoping I inspired you to watch some hockey today. Meanwhile, go crush all your tasks on the road to victory!

Joy Lawless

Joy is a former Implementation Specialist of Wrike.

#Project Management Advice #Just for Fun

Project Management 3 min read

How Monash Motorsport Races to Victory Using Wrike

Monash Motorsport (MMS) is a non-profit student organization hailing from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, where students band together to design, manufacture, test, market, and race their own Formula-style race car. How do they do that? Read on. The organization, which started in 2000 to compete in the Formula SAE Australasia student design competition, has won the competition every year since 2009, a feat which currently ranks Monash Motorsport as 2nd in the world. The team is composed of approximately 70 people each year — 35 senior members plus 35 student recruits. They're mostly from the varied faculties of Engineering, but also include the faculties of Science, Business, Commerce, and Marketing. What's truly cool is that they get to dream up a car completely from scratch, and then actually use it to race with other student organizations. This entails coordinating the process of designing, manufacturing, and assembling over 10,000 individual parts over a period of only nine months. To accomplish this, they organize themselves into five sections, each section having its own technical and qualitative goals for the year. Using Wrike for Collaborative Production Due to the highly interrelated and non-linear design process of the car, work must be done simultaneously and numerous iterations over each part must be completed and tested to reach performance targets. This means that straightforward communication and coordination between each of the technical sections are of utmost importance as the teams collaborate on the car, piece by piece. Monash Motorsport therefore uses Wrike as the tool to unite their teams' design and production efforts. “The project is planned and tasked from the top down,” says Iori Nishida, student consultant for MMS. “The car’s major parts are assigned in Wrike with specific deliverables articulated as milestones. These deliverables are then broken down into achievable weekly tasks to ensure reliable progress and the successful completion of our project." Using the Timeline feature (Gantt chart), the team is able to visualize how their concurrent projects are connected to one another, while also ensuring everyone understands approaching deadlines. Wrike’s mobile apps give each team member the chance to stay on top of project progress even when they're not in the workroom, ensuring accountability in remote team management. Planning a Year in Advance with Wrike “We plan our whole year using Wrike,” says Edward Hamer, MMS' Team Leader. "First we input and block off the important dates — our university semester end dates, semester breaks, our planned Europe tour for the international competitions, our plan to begin designing our 2015 car — hard dates are set and travel dates are reserved, then project milestones can be scheduled around these.” Planning was of particular relevance in 2014, with Monash Motorsport heading to Europe to compete in two of the biggest Formula SAE competitions in the world: the ones in UK and Germany. The team will be using their car from 2013, while simultaneously, they have to build this year’s car for the Australasian competition. Wrike helps them balance both. Hamer says: "Obviously this is a huge task for a group of students and in order for us to succeed and achieve our goals we must be focused and organized. Wrike allows us to maintain a high level of organization within the team at a high efficiency." FSAE-A Competition 2013 from Monash Motorsport on Vimeo.

Project Management 5 min read

Why Project Management 2.0 Is a Different Ball Game

that I attended in October, I met many project management practitioners. Some of them asked me about my views on Project Management 2.0. One of the questions was “How is Project Management 2.0 different from what many organizations have today?” I decided to summarize my answers and came up with a short list of key factors that distinguish Project Management 2.0 from traditional project management. They are: Environment. Manuel Castells, the author of "The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture (v. 1-3)" and a visiting professor in 15 universities around the world, states that we are currently experiencing an IT revolution, just like our predecessors lived through an agricultural revolution and an industrial revolution. According to Castells, there is a shift from industrialism (mass production) to informationalism (flexible production), and this new type of economy is empowered by the development of technologies— first of all, the Internet. As the world shifts from an industrial economy to an information economy and big part of the workforce becomes information workers, the importance of innovation, creativity and productivity rises. In traditional project management, people are often managed like any other resource, just like bricks and machines. In the present economy, people cannot be managed the same way, as it will simply be counterproductive. In Project Management 2.0, people are encouraged to participate in project planning, to introduce their ideas on project development and to give their feedback on other team members’ jobs. Environment as the main differentiator drives the other distinctions listed below: Collaboration and collective intelligence. In an information economy, only organizations that are flexible enough, so that people and capacity can be rearranged and recombined quickly without major structural change, will be able to thrive. Quick access to information and rapid data-sharing become critically important in this environment, as they help companies minimize expenses, innovate, make better decisions and make them faster. Project Management 2.0 emphasizes the importance of leveraging the collective intelligence of the whole team, no matter where the team members are located, at the same office or on different continents. At the same time, Project Management 2.0 stimulates collaboration and catalyzes the change in processes. Here I’d like to paraphrase Andrew MacAfee’s quote about Enterprise 2.0 and apply it to the new trend in project management: Project Management 2.0 technologies are “trying hard not to impose on users any preconceived notions about how work should proceed or how output should be categorized or structured. Instead, they’re building tools that let these aspects of knowledge work emerge.” Emergent structures, one of the basic principles of Project Management 2.0, empowers people on the team level to easily share information and make changes to their part of the project plan. This way, bottom-up field knowledge makes its way into a project schedule, and the schedule becomes more realistic. Comparing this approach with the one represented by most current project management platforms, wiki inventor Ward Cunningham highlights an important shortcoming of the traditional way. He says: “For questions like ‘What’s going on in the project?’ we could design a database. But whatever fields we put in the database would turn out to be what’s not important about what’s going on in the project. What’s important about the project is the stuff you don’t anticipate.” The Project Management 2.0 focus on collective intelligence stipulates the next differentiator. Shift in the project manager’s role. Traditionally, the project management role is focused a lot on tight control of the budget and schedule. This part of the project management job becomes more subtle in a talent economy. Organizational agility requires a more flexible approach to budgeting and deadlines. At the same time, the importance of leveraging the human talent becomes more prominent. Therefore, other parts of a project manager’s job, such as leadership skills, become more important. It's no longer enough for project managers to possess good people skills and to be fluent in project management best practices, tools and methodologies. To succeed today, project managers need enhanced leadership skills. They need to be flexible and focused on business value, writes Forrester Analyst Mary Gerush in “Define, Hire and Develop Your Next Generation Project Managers.” Productivity. Web 2.0 tools allow an unprecedented productivity increase when it comes to information-sharing and communications. There are many examples spanning from the consumer arena to the enterprise space, from Wikipedia and Facebook to GE’s corporate collaboration system. Project Management 2.0 focuses on taking advantage of this productivity to achieve better results in shorter periods of time. Have I enumerated all the distinguishing traits of Project Management 2.0? What’s your take on the main differentiators of Project Management 2.0? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Project Management 5 min read

Secrets to Getting Projects Done in Less Time

The secret of efficiency in project management is pretty simple: You don't need to do everything; you need to do everything that's important. But with tight deadlines, lots of people and multiple projects, planning your time can be very tricky. Matt has first-hand knowledge of what it means to manage multiple project groups with their own goals, priorities and working habits. He knows precisely how crucial it is to have a clear picture of all projects to allocate resources between them, especially when you plan hundreds of tasks for a really large team. "At some point, we decided to bring all that to a system, rather than continue trying to work through the Outlook Calendar," comments Matt Bullock. In less than three months of using Wrike, Matt systematized all his team's tasks and projects in one place. After that, he implemented four project management rules that dramatically changed project planning for Base Camp Franchising and allowed the team to do more in less time with better quality. If you feel overloaded with tasks and stressed out by deadlines, Matt's experience can really help you out. These four rules revolutionized project management in Base Camp Franchising. If you face the same challenges of running multiple projects simultaneously, they might be helpful for your business, too. Here's what Matt advises: 1. Coordinate your team's efforts This may seem obvious, but in reality, too often people are overloaded with unstructured information when new tasks spontaneously appear from everywhere - via e-mails, phone, Skype, etc. Employees rarely see the whole picture of the project, so they're not aware of where the team's priorities stand, or their own definition of capacity in business. Consequently, they get out of sync in collaboration. We all have faced situations when, say, it took three days to complete a task, while there were only three people working on it for an hour each. When a worker isn't in the loop with what his peer does, he might have a wrong vision of priorities. People work on things that seem to be the most important for them, but the priorities may be different on the level of an entire project. To avoid misalignment in his team's efforts, Matt implemented Wrike project management software, which made collaboration in Base Camp Franchising absolutely transparent: "There are two things I like about Wrike. First, it gives me a list of to-dos within each project any time I need it. Secondly, it automatically sends notifications, so that not only me, but all other project contributors are always aware of what they need to accomplish and when." 2. There can't be too many experts We got used to the idea that too many cooks spoil the broth. However, with the impact of technology, this proverb doesn't really match modern collaboration. If your team is able to share information and communicate efficiently, involving experts can help you discover mistakes on earlier stages and avoid losing time on unpromising projects. "We have an outsourcing coder, and I'm able to pull in other subject matter experts on each particular project. We all work in the same environment in Wrike and thus manage to keep everyone in the loop. We involve more people and produce a better product because of that." (Matt Bullock) 3. Use technologies that save time Try to minimize the time you spend on collecting status updates and spreading the information between all collaborators. Instead, focus on the activities that add real value to the results you deliver to your customers. Matt highlights: "Instead of having long meetings in order to know how is the project going, in Wrike, it's like in Facebook, where you post a status on a task when something is happening, and you always know when something has changed or needs to be changed. That helps a lot!" 4. Be precise; it really helps! Project management is not only about managing projects, but also about managing opportunities. You should be ready to estimate your resources immediately when a new idea comes up. This way, you don't risk jumping into something that you are unable to accomplish before the deadline. Matt believes that the Gantt chart is the most efficient tool for making this tip work: "We use the Gantt chart, where we can easily see how much time we have and decide whether we are able to add a new feature or not. I can set task dependencies and milestones, so it's easy to plan to see how changes might influence everything." ___ Applying these methods to its project management practices, Base Camp Franchising improved its time planning and made collaboration more efficient. As a consequence, no change can knock the team off the course – it's now able to react way faster than before. Matt admits that Wrike has greatly influenced these improvements and supports his business a lot on the way to achievements. We welcome you to join one of our FREE Webinar, where you'll learn how Wrike can make your business more successful, too!

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4 Lessons Hockey Has Taught Me About Project Management

1. Hire Flexible Players

2. Seek Guidance from Coaches

3. Take 82 Steps to Victory

4. Plan for the Finals in Stages

Joy Lawless

4 Lessons Hockey Has Taught Me About Project Management

1. Hire Flexible Players

2. Seek Guidance from Coaches

3. Take 82 Steps to Victory

4. Plan for the Finals in Stages

Joy Lawless

Related articles

How Monash Motorsport Races to Victory Using Wrike

Why Project Management 2.0 Is a Different Ball Game

Secrets to Getting Projects Done in Less Time

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