Do not think that the software is your Project Manager

In this podcast, Ricardo is incisive on commenting the relevance and importance of the correct use of project management software. He makes it clear that the fundamentals of project management can not be forgotten because they are much more important than the mastery of any existing software.

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Episode transcript

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Hello, everyone. Welcome to the five minutes PM podcast today. I like to share with you some thoughts regarding the use of tools, software tools to implement projects. First, I'm a big fan of course, off or kind of tools. I have written a lot of books about the too, but what brings me to the concern that I wanted to share with you and this podcast is a people sometimes think that project management is management of a software tool that does pretty much everything for you.

And what concerns me is that people are oversimplifying things. They are just thinking, OK, what I need to know to be a good project manager, all you need to know Microsoft project, or you need to know Primavera or any audit to, and please one, just to make a thing, you need to know project management. So its like the danger we have using a spreadsheet without knowing math. So if you don't know math it to be extremely risky to prepare a very nice and deep spreadsheet because you don't know what is behind that.

So I want to challenge you because I truly believe I'm so sad of sharing this, but I truly believe that most of the project managers, they cannot even calculate critical Beth. And I'm talking about probably the most basic thing. You need to do a proper scheduling. I'm talking about class 101 in whiteness. Why are you?

Speaker 1 (1m 30s): Is because people think okay to calculate Greek up for it,

Speaker 0 (1m 33s): Press the red button here. And Dan, it will color that the critical tasks his in red and then I'm done. No, you need to understand what drives the creation of a critical task. You need to understand what drives the exposition of a risk each, not just press a button. So you need to challenge yourself. You need to be able to be a decent project manager. You need to be able to do every single task that the software does using your hands are posted notes, paper, pen, and pencil.

And that's all of course it will take maybe a hundred times more time, but you need to be able to do that. You need to be able, OK. If I need to calculate the critical path, I know how to do this. If I need to create a WBS chart, I know how to do this, but I'm using the tool to speed up the process into do this operational site. Don't let and don't think that the machine will replace your brain in your decision making process. Over the data you receive. So all softwares.

They are data processing. So I saw a lot of people, very much concerned about the,

Speaker 1 (2m 41s): To me and just forgetting about who is the project manager, which kind of skills

Speaker 0 (2m 45s): We need. We are kind of critical thinking we need from the product manager. So it's oversimplified. We need the thing about this because most of the fellow we face it's because we decide to put in place with project managers that only know that too. And we think that knowing the two, they know how to handle the project and this is a completely wrong perception of the problem. Please. I do want that to think that I'm against I'm. I use software just all the time, just all the time, but I use this voice, a lot of confidence that if I need to think over the data, I'm able to do that.

And you also, you need to be able to do that. Hope you enjoyed this podcast. See you next week with another five minutes PM. Podcast.

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Do not think that the software is your Project Manager

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