Planting a Garden

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!