Murphy Law and the Projects

In this podcast Ricardo talks about the effects of pessimism and the Murphys Law inside the projects.

Episode transcript

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

Hello everybody welcome to the five minutes PM podcast. Today, I will talk about the Murphy law and the pessimism during the project. Why I'm talking this nowadays, it's much easier for us to have a very pessimistic approach, dueling our project, then a very optimist approach. And I personally, I don't like this. And I think that our behavior, as the project manager will be packed dramatically.

Our team behaviour, our supplier's in all the environment and that's where arounds us at the projects. And when I see people complaining about their Projects and one thing that I'd like to let you know is that project and project management is not an easy task and it's not for everybody. It's a very hard work. If you are doing a project in, if you think that the project is easy, a trust me something is wrong, or you didn't catch exactly what is the project or someone told you the wrong story of why I'm saying this because always and every single project is running and the limit between what is possible and what is impossible to be done.

And it's an inside the DNA of each project, the challenge, and because of that project managers are extremely vulnerable professionals for this scenario. When we have all this challenge is very easy to become pessimistic, say, Oh, this project will not go out. I'm sure everything can go wrong. Will have a cost of around scandal. The leis will have problems with our resource.

We'll run with a lot of traps and it's very easy to have this approach. But what I like to propose You is to change, lets change our behavior to a more optimist. I'm not talking about the blind optimism. And if they say, Oh its easy. So let you do anything. We want to know. Every fish will be fine at the end. No, but be sure that we've competence, competence plus motivation.

And plus an optimist behavior will make the difference to make a successful project. Very strong optimism. Believe that together we can make the difference for the project. And this is so important because I personally, I do not like to much this kind of self help books, but I received one as a gift from a friend in Brazil and the book, the secret and only to wrap up one concept is you will get, what do you think?

So if you go to a project with a very pessimist approach, everything we'll go wrong. I'm sure I'm sure. But if you go with optimists saying, Oh, this will be a challenge, but we are here. Why the hell? But he's they pay us to work for them because it's hard. It's hard. It's not an easy task because nobody will pay you to do an easy task. They will pay someone else and I'm sure they will pay much less.

So it's very important that our behavior, it must be very optimist and this I'm sure everybody will see this as an opportunity to grow. So it's it's for example, he fooled, we see the, the team's doing the world cup championship, the FIFA world cup. It's easy to see how the optimism, how this drive the change during the game. And it's very important because nowadays with all these, the economic crisis, very, very easy the pessimist.

And I remember when I was a student at this school during my chemical engineering course and about the entropy concept, entropy is the level of disorder have one environment. And the entropy loss tells us the entropy 10 to go to infinite with the time Mintz, the disorder, which will take place naturally. But the order will need a very hard work. Think about your home.

The things are mixed at up and the dirt appears in your home without any help. You don't need to say, Oh, tomorrow my mate will come. So let's make some dirt here. So they will have anything to do tomorrow that they will have something to do tomorrow. No, this is wrong. This is wrong. This disorder become something natural. The problem is to turn this disorder into order then will need to contract mate to clean up our house in a weekly base or in the monthly bays.

This is very important. And its the same approach. If you want that, your project goes to the Hill, just do nothing just to nothing let's happen. It's a, it's much easier to create the damage than to create the solution, but with a very optimist approach with good tools, motivation in a very good behavior will make the change in this will turn something very true into something very successful.

This is what I was planning to talk to you this week. See you next week with another five minutes PM. Podcast see you.

Menu

Resources & Insights

Products & Services

More Resources & Insights

Ricardo Vargas

Podcasts

Murphy Law and the Projects

Search in Podcasts

Latest podcast episodes

Book recommendations