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.
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.
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.