Project Management Learning Techniques

Introduction

A great deal of project management involves understanding new information, organizing it, and integrating it into what we already know. That’s a process that generally describes “learning”, though it’s learning in a broad sense, not just the traditional classroom-and-note-taking kind of process that we normally associate with the term.

Let’s consider, for example, how you might review a complex set of project requirements. You’d first focus on understanding each separate requirement. Then you might organize them in different ways to compare them and consider how they relate to one another. The result would be clusters of related requirements. You would then use your technical and management knowledge to determine what the clusters of requirements mean with respect to the needed project structure, activities, schedule and cost.

From the outside that process of assimilation, organization, and integration into pre-existing knowledge looks very different from anything you’ve ever done in a classroom. However, it is cognitively identical to the formal learning process. The same could be said about troubleshooting a project issue (learning the facts about the issue, assembling them into causes and consequences, using your knowledge of the project's operational environment and relevant technical disciplines to define possible courses of action), performing a stakeholder analysis, developing a briefing or report, or many other activities that are a part of project management.

Improving our learning skills will therefore not only help us improve our project management capabilities and achieve the various certifications important to our profession, it can also improve the skills and techniques we bring to the everyday tasks of project management. Our aim in this series of articles is to step you through an analysis of your learning skills and preferences to see if there are ways to expand, if not improve, the techniques you use to apply those skills and preferences.

Different Folks Take Different Notes

The next time you're in a meeting of any size, take look around you and notice how different people are engaged in the meeting. Some people are totally involved in the social give-and-take of the meeting. Others are taking detailed notes of what's being said, maybe in a highly structured outline form. Another person looks somewhat uninvolved with the meeting, listening to what's going on while he or she gazes around the room. Yet another is covering their notepaper with drawings, key phrases surrounded by clouds or stars, and maybe random quotes from people in the meeting. Someone else cannot resist the temptation of striding up to the white board, writing some words on it and then gesturing at them, emphasizing them with circles and underlines, and walking back and forth as they talk to the other people in the meeting.

These differences reflect the different ways that those people deal with information. Over the last few decades, we've become increasingly comfortable with the idea that people have different abilities and preferences in how they process information. For example, the popular Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is based upon the idea that people can be categorized by their preferred styles of dealing with the different situations we encounter in life.

This is certainly true of learning. We've all seen these differences. For example, you've probably noticed that some people require absolute silence when studying or thinking through something while others need some kind of background noise or music to really concentrate. Also, every good teacher knows that when he or she is explaining a difficult concept it’s best to do it in different ways to accommodate the different learning styles of his or her students.

In a perfect world we would all develop a learning style that is uniquely suited to our abilities. To some degree, we probably do. However, as we went through our years of education we all did what we had to do to meet the demands of the moment. That inevitably shaped our learning habits in ways that may not be perfectly suited to our preferred learning style. There is therefore a good chance that each of as can improve how we learn by adjusting our learning techniques to better match our learning abilities and styles.

Matching our learning habits to our learning abilities and styles involves three basic steps:

1. Assess what your natural strengths and preferences are in how you learn new material
2. Acquire techniques and tools that exploit your learning abilities and style
3. Integrate these techniques and tools into your learning, initially on an experimental basis.

Future articles in this series will step through these steps. The remainder of this article addresses a general approach to learning in a project management context.