Posted on 11/24/2020 3:53:07 PM PST by EQAndyBuzz
Would your day be better organized if you woke up with a plan every morning? Once given that plan, would you review it thoroughly to make certain there are no errors within it? If you needed resources, would you want the best and brightest to share your plan and implement the various activities needed to be successful? Would you do a risk analysis, SWOT Plan, PEST analysis, Gap analysis? This plan is so important that if one "t" isn't crossed the plan will fall apart. Are you committed to it and have a major stake in it?
OK, I am talking about going to the H.E.B for food shopping, but you can see from a project managers perspective everything that a plan must address in order to considered a success.
Trump is the consummate Project Manager. When you look at the things he has done over the last four years in office, and the last 50 years in business, his success rate on getting things done has been pretty darn good. Whether it was the wall, Middle East Peace, lower taxes or the construction of a building in some corner of the world. That's 50 years of experience conducting a SWOT analysis to see what the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities or threats will be realized during construction of a building. Or a PEST analysis, which would consist of analyzing the political, environmental, social and technological aspects of putting up a building. This would require the project to have resources on the ground to gather intelligence on the local situation and the impact it will have on construction and future planning.
One of the larger components of a project plan are the smaller plans that role up into the master plan. A communications plan in the PM's eyes is the most critical piece. Who gets to see the project's status? The media, nor the Democrats could comprehend that their exclusion of receiving project status was based on who the stakeholders were, and the media and DNC were not stakeholders. They were a risk and an impediment and Trump mitigated the risk by taking his message directly to the people from his Twitter account. His Stakeholders.
In the Magic PM Triangle, or in Triple Constrain Theory, the three items are Scope, Cost, Time. There is a fourth which overlaps each one and that is quality. Look at everything the Trump has done. He selects a project, narrows its scope, looks at the cost and how long it will take to complete. The Wall is a perfect example.
The United States was transformed into "The United States Corporation" and that's why it has been successful over the last four years. Stakeholders are prospering. Trump realized that running a government in its current state does not work, nor will it ever work. Republican or Democrat, it doesn't matter. There is no process, only regulations and procedures that as we know, weren't very well thought out nor implemented. Regulations that line up with the Triple Constraint, hurt businesses worldwide. Trump removed those constraints and we saw what happened.
The downside to all of this, is a Project Managers worst nightmare, where everyone is yelling at him/her, we are told that the Project is in the red and there is no solution on how to turn it around. Especially when the project is actually in the green and the whiners in the media and DNC have an agenda. Trump lived through that every single day. The red is costs are rising, schedule has slipped and the scope changes from congress and lobbyists are designed to trip him up, not help the stakeholders. That's what Trump has lived through every day. And he still succeeded.
Trump is about process. Every move he makes is part of a plan. When it looks like Trump is talking off the cuff, he isn't. Only on the golf course or with Melania and the kids will he be himself and not the Project Manager running the greatest country on the planet.
As a Project Manager, I took all emotions out of the equation and just used the data at hand to make an assessment. One day there will be a white paper on Trump's Presidency, which will either be told to children for generations to come, or sent down the memory hole never to be spoken of again.
Project Managers is a person put ion charge of a project to manage.
More often than not they don’t know a damn thing about the project only what they have read or have been told.
Somewhere in the project process they’ll find a way to make their mark on the project so they can say “see what I did” which in turns leads to cost overruns, schedule slides, reduction in requirements and a product moving to something that doesn’t resemble anything it started out to be.
In the end the project manager that did all this will be moved to another project to F that up or be promoted.
Trump isn’t a Project Manager. He’s a business man with common sense and a vision on how to achieve it.
Thank you EQAndyBuzz, I love your summary & agree 100%! I have had the privilege of supporting awesome PMs on civil engineering planning, design, and construction projects, and have also noticed what an excellent PM our President Trump is! He TOTALLY gets it, has the experience & drive, and is so successful!
Maddog55, I also agree with you 100%... unfortunately, after more than a decade supporting AWESOME Technical PMs that clients & staff love, complete award-winning projects, enable multidisciplinary teams to accomplish awesome things, and mentor junior staff... I am now at a firm with such bad leadership & rude/arrogant Technical Managers that they created a whole new “PM” department. Just so the TMs can continue their rudeness on the work instead of client communication. These are the nightmare PMs you describe. They don’t understand the projects, have an overwhelming workload, etc.
Yes, I will be moving on shortly - after the election/holidays/COVID shutdowns, but it’s Night vs. Day comparing the two types of “Project Managers” certified by PMI.
Nice analysis. It is my opinion, after observing Donald Trump from afar, is that he doesn’t take a dump without a plan...and a backup plan. He’s extremely goal oriented (toward substantive things, rather than just getting reelected), which is very different from virtually every other politician, ever.
Piss poor project management.
I’m an extraordinarily experienced PMP and I can tell you from a PM perspective he failed. Miserably.
He never got his stakeholders onboard.
He didn’t even get a majority of Republicans aboard.
His term didn’t have anything to do with Project Management.
But it’s a good study in leadership.
I am a retired project manager, and what you state makes no sense..
A project manager is usually an engineer or equivalent, and is intimately familiar not only with the project but the associated industry.
Your ignorance is staggering
“Your ignorance is staggering”
I agree.
I agree with your assessment.
I have stated over and over again, he knew about this at least 2 years ago.
Plenty of time to come up with a workable plan and preventative measures to ensure success....
Now if the plan was to entrap the bad guys, it would have swung into action on election day.
As it stands right now the plan has failed, the votes are counted and he has lost..
The only hope is in the courts, and we have seen first hand how that goes...
Rule#1, have a plan.
Rule#2, have a back up plan, because the first one is not going to work.
From a PM point of view, fail..
Business schools are going to have to tear up their textbooks on management. I’d like to see the Sloan School endow a Trump chair, considering that PDJT had an uncle at MIT.
I am a retired project manager, and what you state makes no sense..
A project manager is usually an engineer or equivalent, and is intimately familiar not only with the project but the associated industry.
Your ignorance is staggering
+++++
You saved me some time. You are correct.
I too was an engineering Program Manager for many years at a large aerospace company. Picking a team, choosing the team leaders, knowing and communicating the goals, strategy for success, the budget and time constrains, and the overall team progress to the team and the senior management is what Program Managers do.
Your professional experience differs significantly from mine. In my projects, everyone gets to see the project status- for better or worse- on a Project, Excel/Sharepoint or BI dashboard or even Post It Note whiteboard for everyone to see- at their convenience, not mine.
I've always found transparency to be critical. I never had a situation where keeping information from a stakeholder- no matter how adversarial- worked to make the project more successful.
Having worked in government / DoD for 38 years in engineering and defense acquisition so I am intimately familiar with many PMs. No not all PMs are bad but there’s a huge percentage that are. Their goal in life is promotion not the project.
It also depends on the field the PMs are working. Just had a retirement home built and went through 3 PMs during the 12 month process. Nice people all three but nice doesn’t get shxt done. They were clueless on what was being built for me. They referenced the wrong design plans, old design plans, not following the detailed items list we had picked out per the home builders sit down, they just put in standard builder crap which had to be removed and redone taking a 6 - 8 month project and turned it into 12 months.
Not sure what you retired from but my inference is based on years of experience in the filed I worked in not to mention the retirement home.
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