Project Management Learning Techniques

A Strategy for Learning Project Management

There’s no way around it – learning something requires work. Even if your goal is only to memorize something (say, a sequence of steps in a process), you’ll have to use some kind of activity like reciting them over and over or using flash cards in order to register that list in your memory. And to lock it into your long-term memory and give it some functional value, you’ll need to integrate the new information into what you already know. After all, a remembered list of steps is only a bunch of words until you can answer the "So what?" questions, like: What does this mean to me? and How do I use it?

All of those activities constitute the learning process by which we come to know, understand, and apply new information. These articles are about selecting the learning activities and techniques that will work best for us in any situation. But before we focus on individual differences in learning style, let’s consider two general points about learning project management concepts and techniques.

Learning Through Application

The first point is based on the fact that project management is a highly applied science. While no knowledge is without potential use, the sole purpose of project management expertise is its application in improving the outcome of projects. Therefore the strongest learning approach to a new project management concept, process, or technique is to focus on its application.

Consider this analogy: You can learn a foreign language by memorizing vocabulary lists and studying rules of grammar, pronunciation, and word usage. At the end of that process, you’ll have struggled through a lot of painful learning and have acquired a lot of language knowledge. But you're likely to have developed only a limted skill in applying that knowledge in speaking and understanding the language. On the other hand, you could learn the language by using it, first in simple situations and then in  increasingly complex ones. In that case, you will naturally pick up the language knowledge you need as you use it to support your growing skill with the language.

Learning project management is like learning a language in that it is best learned through application. There are of course abstract concepts and issues in project management that will require traditional study approaches. But even in those cases you should study that material with an eye to how it can be applied.

A general approach to take in building your project management knowledge and skills is to do so while asking yourself how the material you're learning can add value to your current or upcoming project management tasks. For example, you might consider questions like:

• What project issues can it help identify or resolve?
• How can it make my projects more effective and efficient?
• Where, when, and how in my current project(s) would it best be implemented?
• In what type of situation would it be important and in what type would it not? How come?
• What other aspects of project management does it help me understand or apply?
• Are there other members of my project’s staff who would benefit from knowing it?

Answering questions like these will guide and reinforce your understanding of new project management concepts, processes, and techniques. It will also help tie the new knowledge or skill into what you already know, thereby increasing the chance of its long-term retention and value. Finally, thinking through new material in a personalized, real-world context is a good cure for the glassy-eyed stare that tends to develop after reading the seventh consecutive page of abstract process descriptions.

Capitalizing on Your Experience

The second point is related to the first and concerns the greatest resource we all bring to the study of project management – our experience. Whether you’re a long-time project manager or someone who’s preparing to step into that role, you have had the experience of leading, participating in, and/or observing projects. Exploit that experience as you continue to develop your project management capabilities.

Here’s one approach for doing that. Think through all of the projects that you’ve been involved with, managed, or have been in a position to closely observe. Now pick out two or three that stand out in your mind as having been very successful. Next, choose two or three that in your view were problematic or unsuccessful. Avoid choosing projects that were total disasters since they were probably so fundamentally flawed that they can’t provide a good basis for generalizable lessons-learned. Besides, your knowledge of such flawed projects would of course be based on only remote, third-person observation.

Once you have your lists of successful and unsuccessful projects developed, pull together as much information as you can readily assemble on each one. You’re going to be using these projects as reference points and test cases during your study so you may be looking at different parts of these projects and looking at them in new ways. Having project information files near at hand could be valuable if some time in the future you have to consider a part of the project that you were not originally involved with or privy to.

As you build your project management capabilities—whether through formal training or informal personal study—use your two sets of projects as points of reference to consider how the new approach, concept, or technique you’re learning figured into the projects' management, or could have, and with what effect. Consider, for example:

• How was this project management concept or technique applied in the group of successful projects? If it was applied or addressed fully, how did that contribute to the project’s success? If it wasn’t, did that make any difference?
• Conversely, how was this aspect of project management applied in the set of unsuccessful projects? If it was applied or addressed, was that done well? If it wasn’t:
• Did that contribute to the projects’ unsatisfactory outcome?
• How and when should it have been addressed or applied?
• Who should have done so?
• How would that have contributed to the project’s operations and outcome?
• Are there any noticeable differences between the very successful and the unsuccessful projects in how they addresses/applied this project management aspect or technique? Is that a coincidence or is there a identifiable dynamic through which the project management aspect or technique affected the projects’ outcome, for better or worse?

The greatest value of questions like these lies not in their answers. The true value is in the work you do in coming up with the answers. Answering questions like these (and those listed are only a few possibilities) will require and test your full understanding of the aspect/technique you’re learning. The repeated application of that understanding to both the successful and the problematic projects can provide a type of "virtual experience" in applying that understanding in different situations, thereby promoting its application in your current and future projects . Clearly, the more effort that is put into answering these questions, the greater the potential benefit in learning, retaining, and applying the topic you’re learning.

Keep It Real

In general, then, the overall approach in your continued development of project management expertise is, in a phrase: Keep it real. If you tie your acquisition of new knowledge and skill to your current and past project experience, you will be able to gain additional insights into that experience that will increase its value. You will also anchor your new knowledge or skill into the framework of what you already know and can do, thereby increasing its long-term retention and its immediate value to your project management responsibilities.

The next article in this series will look at the different types of learning styles that people have and will point you to ways of figuring out what your main styles are.

Check back with us soon to catch this next installment.