Project Management: The Art of Balancing Spinning Plates
09 01 2016
Being a project manager can get tricky, especially when working on several time-sensitive projects at once. It’s like the art of balancing multiple spinning plates: you have to focus on all of them at once in order to keep them from falling from their sticks. It can get complicated—very quickly.
One challenge in particular is maintaining schedules, especially when there are a lot of moving parts that you don’t have much control over. When certain elements of a project are unpredictable or take longer than expected to come together, flexibility becomes critical.
Making sure that the deliverables of a project are error free can also be daunting, depending on the nature of the project. For example, when you’ve got several million books to print and ship halfway around the world that all need to be of equally high quality and delivered on time, it can seem like mission impossible. In situations like this, however, it is best to step back and look at the sum of all parts; in this way, you can break a large, complex project up into smaller pieces that are more manageable.
One of the most important jobs for a project manager is to be able to balance expectations and reality. Sometimes, the two match up and everything works well, but the reality of the situation can be very different from expectations at the onset of a project. The key to overcoming any type of challenge during the course of a project is communication. In the end, the ultimate goal is to ensure the client is completely satisfied with the outcome of the project. That is the true meaning of a successful project for us, epitomizing the art of balancing all of those spinning plates.
