3 Simple Ways to Improve your Experience with Projects

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about the many ways to gain experience in project management that go beyond formal education, courses and certifications. He also mentions that you don't start a career in projects managing gigantic or highly complex projects.

The main part of the podcast is in the three tips you can follow to increase your experience and make project management part of your DNA.

The first is that it is necessary to apply project management concepts in our daily lives. We should think of simple tasks and small projects in our daily lives as opportunities to practice the concepts. Whether it's planning your child's birthday, renovating your home or completing your MBA project. There are opportunities all the time to think about the possibility of setting up a Kanban, an EAP or even applying the concept of decision gates, so talked about in the FEL model.

The second tip is that you diversify your experience, applying the concepts in different areas and projects. This diverse experience allows you to learn about various aspects, approaches and challenges.

And the third tip is that you look for opportunities to volunteer in your own company's projects, dedicating extra time to this, making you help your colleagues and learn new concepts.

Listen to the episode to learn more.

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Episode transcript

The transcript is generated automatically by Podscribe, Sonix, Otter and other electronic transcription services.

Hello, everyone, welcome to the five minute podcast!

Today, I like to talk about ways to get experience in projects. I know that many of us, we think that courses education credentials. They are good for us to learn and understand and specific competence, ok? A specific method and the specific approach. But how do we get actual experience? And this is one of the biggest challenges because of course, you can do simulations inside the courses. You can have a very solid and strong education, but if you don't have the experience, it's like thinking about love without experimenting love. You know, in theoretical terms, maybe it's easier to understand, but for example, when you feel it's different, and I want to explain this in the project context, and I want to give you three advices or three tips that I use for myself to get this experience.

The first one is shift your mindset in your daily activities. Most of the people starting working with projects they always think that, you know, know when I will have my first nuclear power plant project or my new Facebook or social media giant. We always think about this massive, huge, complex projects, and we just forget that we can apply the tools and techniques we already learned in our daily activities.

You can plan your next vacation. You can use a Kanban board to manage, for example, the renovation of your kitchen. Why not? We always think that, for example, to use Kanban or to use Scrum, you need to work with a specific. Why we cannot do this in our private lives? And this is one of the things that helped me most to understand when some kind of tools are more helpful or less helpful because I always think all the time I'm thinking about doing something I'm thinking with this temporary mindset, it's what will be the best tool for me. How do I identify risks? How do I manage the uncertainty? Which kind of team do I need to build to deliver that? And this can be your vacation. This can be your next birthday party. This can be your wedding celebration. Everything. There are so many projects in your personal life that you can apply, and these will give you this small scale experience that make yourself more used to this kind of environment to this kind of project based environment.

The second thing is diversity. You need to diversify your experience. For example, if you work with software, you should not only apply your knowledge in software, try to taste different projects. These will make yourself a more rounded profession.For example, I'm an engineer, but I help it many IT projects, many humanitarian projects at my time at the U.N. and why this? Because these made myself more complete. It gave me different dimensions of what is, for example, a WBS chart, or how do I use a daily scrum? Or how do I identify risks? Which kind of techniques should I use? Because it's not one size fits all? So you should try to look for different experiences.

And the third one is I strongly suggest you to become volunteer, and I'm not saying that you should become volunteer in only in your professional association or the charity you like to support, but you can become a volunteer inside your own company. You can offer yourself to support a different project where you provide your services and you receive a different learning. Try to join different groups trying to join different efforts. These will make you more experienced and more prepared to handle the different challenges, and this is what really matters. Above and beyond any course, any education is your taste and your feeling about the challenge you need to overcome to deliver successful projects.

Think always about that and see you next week with another Five Minutes Podcast.

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