What’s your project management personal best?

Outside of professional arenas, in sports such as weight-lifting, our competition is from within and not without.

Committed gym rats are keenly aware of how much weight they can lift, push or pull for each of the muscle groups in their workout rotation. Even though their overall goal might be to maintain their fitness level, they will try to add more weight.

So long as continuous improvement doesn’t become an obsession, this internal competition is healthy since it facilitates positive social interactions with our gym buddies as we all strive to help each other beat their own personal bests.

So can this concept also apply to project management?

Competing against other project managers is as futile as comparing our workout performance with another.

Just as there is always someone at your gym who is bigger, stronger or leaner than you, there are going to be project managers who will perform better than you do within a given context. While it is possible to reach a performance peak for specific hard skills such as scheduling or budgeting through a combination of education and experience, improving our competencies with soft skills and business knowledge knows no limits.

Our people managers will always need to assess us for annual evaluation or incentive purposes but with an almost infinite range of influencing variables which can affect project performance it will be very challenging to identify minor differences in competency. This is why subjectivity often drives decisions such as who gets the highest bonus in a team where everyone is performing well.

This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t observe how other project managers are practicing their trade and identify and mimic the patterns which seem to bring them success. I might observe a fellow gym user who is using a different stance for a particular exercise than mine which seems to enable him to lift more weight than I can. I could give that stance a try if I think it will help but I need to remember that the stance which works for one person given their height, weight and skeletal and muscular structure might not be suitable for me.

The same model of work out machine will feel different when one goes from one gym to another. Each project is unique hence what causes someone to be successful on project A might result in mediocre outcomes on project B. Knowing that our personal bests are constrained by context, if we can isolate or reduce the number of variables, we can then establish a baseline against which we can measure improvements in performance. If we have had a trying relationship with a given group of stakeholders, on subsequent projects we can attempt to reduce the number of conflicts we have with them.

Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do – John Wooden