What in the world has planting a garden have to do with Project Management?
I think a lot.
First my confession: I have always been a gardener of some sort or another. I will pick three oranges off my orange tree this year. Its tough keeping an orange tree in the mountains, even in a green house.
I grew up in a neighborhood where most families kept a vegetable garden (a vestige of the great depression and the war years) so I knew how to plant and pick carrots (my specialty) and pick tomatoes. My grandmother even had an urban garden where she grew the cucumbers to be pickled later. One year a few decades ago, my wife and I shared a quarter acre garden with friends. it was a lot of work but we had lots of vegetables for ourselves and our fiends from June to December.
Mostly over the last few years I have planted grasses, trees, flowering shrubs and flowering plants. This year we set in an experimental garden with a wide variety of vegetables, in a variety of micro environments. I will report later this summer on what we learned.
But I digress.
A good project manager should be a bit of a gardener.
- Gardeners think and plan ahead.
- What can we plant next week, next year?
- What can we grow this season?
- Gardeners are experimenters.
- What new things can we plant?
- Will they actually grow?
- How can we change the environment for our plants?
- Gardeners are nurturers.
- We water and weed so our plants can thrive?
- Gardeners are Darwinists.
- Sometimes things just won’t thrive and we pull them out so as not to waste effort on the unfruitful things?
- Gardeners are reapers.
- We will pick our flowers and vegetables in due time.
- Gardeners are opportunists.
- Ever find a “volunteer” plant or tree in your garden? I have, and watched it grow.
- Gardeners are investors.
- We save seeds or buy inexpensive seeds and harvest valuable crops?
- Gardeners should be practical, but we aren’t
- Think about my orange tree!
As a developer/project manager I always thought in terms of planting seeds that would grow into valuable plants to be picked by someone (not necessarily me). I also knew that sometimes those seeds would either not sprout or would wither and die, and there would be nothing I could do about it.
The take away: as a good PM, think of yourself as a gardener. You plant the seeds, add water and light, and the plants do all the work!
