Project Management: A Primer

Be Smart with Your Time, Effort, and Money

By Charles Morgan of Old Hickory’s Volunteers of Middle Tennessee.

Among the readership of this publication are innumerable young men who can truly be described as elite human capital. We are an organization of men of intellect, ambition, and ideas. We would like to be the organization possessing such things.

Water attracts water. Intellect attracts intellect. Ambition attracts ambition. Hard work attracts hard work. Like attracts like. This is equally true of ideas. Men with ideas attract men with more ideas; however, unlike intellect, ambition, or hard work, there is a limit to the usefulness of more ideas. At a certain point (perhaps very quickly), they exceed the other capabilities of the organization, begin to contradict and steal from one another, and foment internal division. The solution to this problem is a science known as Project Management.

Ideas are good. They are the expression of intellect and the cause of ambition; however, if they are not to fade uselessly into the ether or else lash out in unrequited frustration, their passions must be discharged by implementation, which requires the rarest resource among intellectuals: labor. Thus, if an idea is so powerful to convince someone(s) to take up laboring on its behalf, what we will call a project is born. Projects must be better organized than most ideas to be successful, because to practice is more difficult than to preach.

In this article, I will lay out a short list of steps that one or more people can take to establish a project successfully and carry an idea through to completion. Note, the use of the word completion. A project has a scope, a definitive end (either in success or failure). It is rarely a good idea to create a project of indeterminate scope or duration, although a good project often may generate natural continuances. These are new projects, and even if certain resources are reused (such as a committee), it is a good idea to return to the basics and go through the procedure outlined here:

Step One. Clearly describe the project. This comes first, because everyone must be on the same page, or else you will really have two or more projects in a committee where people will be talking past one another, undermining one another, and wasting time — weeks, even months into operations — debating the very purpose of the work.

Step Two. Organize your committee. A disorganized project will almost never accomplish anything because of a fundamental lack of accountability:

• The persons formally organized as a committee must explicitly acknowledge their involvement, agree to contribute, and accept accountability for the failure or success of the project.

• Leadership for the committee must be determined. There must be a person that other committee members can be accountable to, because accountability is always to a person, and oneself is usually not sufficient. Multiple executives are unadvisable; however, it is often very good to rotate leadership, as this distributes the burdens and inhibits the development of tyranny. The leader does not need to be the most useful member, but must understand his own degree of knowledge respecting the project and have the humility to admit its failing.

Step Three. Catalogue the resources available, including persons’ time, financial resources, physical assets, etc. One person’s time is not fungible with another’s; a lawyer’s time isn’t the same resource as a carpenter’s, and the value of either’s time will depend on the project. Some resources (e.g., money) belong to the committee; others to individuals that may be used on behalf of the committee (a person’s time, especially). Obtain commitments regarding those private resources before moving forward.

Note that obtaining commitments from individuals before beginning committee work benefits the individual as well as the committee. Everyone is much happier if he has agreed to what he will be asked to do, and a voluntary time commitment puts a protective upper limit on what one individual may be asked to do.

Step Four. Define the project. This is different from Step One (“Clearly describe the project”). The key here is detail. Now that you have an organization and understand your resources, it is time to refine the scope and direction of the project to match those resources and the interests of the members. Make a plan. Make it as complicated and detailed as you can at this stage, but understand that not all of it will survive contact with the enemy (people doing work).

It is critical to include: the project deliverable, a timeline (such as a Gantt chart), the expected contributions of members, and a plan about how to distribute credit/rewards if any may accrue:

• The project deliverable is the reason that you have a project. It is the goal, but not any goal: it is a more tangible-specific goal than most people set in their lives. There should be nothing vague about the deliverable. For example, do not say, “This is a committee to distribute ALP to the homeless”; say, “This committee intends to provide twenty homeless people with ninety 9-mg tropical fruit ALP nicotine pouches per month for three months beginning June 1st.” Do that, awesome, project finished. The deliverable should be appropriate to the resources of the project as they currently exist. Acquiring more resources is a deliverable in and of itself, not a stepping stone to one. If resources are acquired during a project, it is better to revise expectations as that occurs.

• The project timeline creates a schedule for work to get done. Most people need a schedule; otherwise, no work will get done. It also helps to set a realistic end date for a project in order to have some idea of when any of the potential intermediate steps may be completed. A timeline can incorporate expected contributions of each member, and very sophisticated, professional projects often detail exactly when and what work each member is delivering. Moreover, a good timeline makes the task of project leader easy, rather than seemingly impossible and something no one wants to do.

• A project should clearly delegate who is to contribute what. Doing this ahead of time is fair, ensures accountability, and dramatically increases the likelihood of success. It is perfectly fine if the agreed-upon contributions are highly asymmetrical (in fact, such an arrangement may be necessary), but all project members must be in agreement as to what they and others are to contribute and potentially receive. It may be impractical to specify exactly what each member should do, but if the resources that they have agreed to contribute are defined, then they should agree to be assigned appropriate work.

• A project may involve rewards that for numerous reasons — including legal, personal, motivational, etc. — must have an agreed-upon distribution before the main efforts are made. These rewards could be as simple as who gets credit, or in the case of a project producing commercial goods, so complicated as to require a formal contract. Do not neglect this. Members suing one another is perfect evidence of poor project management.

Step Five. Execute the project. If you have read and done everything prior, then I should barely need to describe what this looks like; you have done so. Instead, I will use this space to relay some standing maxims:

• Respect. Standards of decorum, especially in online chats, must be maintained. Members must stay on topic (if the chat is a forum for the work). Members must be respectful to one another and about one another’s contributions, large or small.

• Discipline. Personal infractions or inadequate work will occur in some projects. It’s good to have some forward understanding about how these are to be dealt with and by whom. Rules are often perceived as very unfair if they are unclear or unstated, and very fair if they are clear and stated.

• Communication. Regular communication is key. Members will become frustrated or checked out if meetings/communications are too infrequent or irregular. Good communication is work. It is a task that must be done like any other and is deserving of as much recognition and credit.

Step Six. Determine the success or failure of the project. If the deliverable is sufficiently tangible-specific, then absolute success should be blitheringly obvious. However, it is very normal to be partially or alternatively successful. Sometimes, the project deliverable changes over the course of the project. Often a deliverable is a quantifiable thing, which may not be fully, but partially completed. Depending on the project, this may not really be failure.

Success should be quantified throughout the course of the project, not only to track progress, but also to maintain an economy of effort. A project that has succeeded, but continues to expend resources, has failed at project management. Likewise, a project that expends all of its resources (especially time) without delivering has failed. At that point (or before, if it is clear a project will fail in the future), a decision needs to be made whether to continue or to end that project.

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Readers, I hope that this has been helpful to you. The outline above is the means to bring your ideas to life. It may also be a test of your ideas. If you cannot imagine such a procedure as I have outlined being used to push your idea into a reality, then it may not be an idea suitable to dedicating time, effort, and money. A bad project is an indictment of an idea more powerful and useful than any that could be thought up in debate. When we ask what it means to be of the Right, one of the natural axioms to follow should be that it means to be real. Thank you.