Can We Derive Relationships or Similarities Between Project Management and Cricket?

I am a fan of cricket and played professional cricket during my college days. Like many sports I learnt a lot about the importance of winning and losing in life. I am an advocate of saying every person should know and play at least one sport. It develops character in you.

Being at home for the last 3 months, I watched a lot of cricket matches… One Day, Test Matches, T20s and of course now IPL. And at some point of time, I started correlating this with my professional life of Project Management.

As in cricket, situations keep changing as the game progresses, project scenarios also do not remain the same throughout its life cycle. But, unlike sport, how many times do we change the execution strategy in between? In fact, many of us are afraid of changing anything in between, saying the history and legacy will be lost.

However, we probably need different skillsets at different stages of the project.

• Someone can start the project very well, establish processes, set ground rules, make a team, and then start working on it. We need “organization skills” more. We need a PM who is methodical and who knows how to “set the project” within different cultures. His/ her organization and client organization.
• During the prime phase of the project, we need “leaders” who can guide the team and drive the project forward. Not only his/her own team, but also clients, vendors and other stakeholders. He/ she is a good communicator, who has people skills. Who can do risk management effectively?
• And, then we need someone who can close the project properly. He who can plug the gaps, collate all information, document lessons, and set the path for next projects and PMs. We need “experience” here to connect the past and future.

Is it worth it to have multiple Project Managers for a single project, with different skillsets? What do you think?

Traditionally, we take pride in saying we started the project and finished the project in time, within the set budget and it was successful. But as I researched more, the definition of success itself kept changing throughout the project lifecycle. Especially, when we are doing client projects, success for clients could be entirely different from success of projects that we define. At times it’s contradictory, if we are more focused only on commercial success of the project.

Are you ready to experiment with your project? Is it easy to convince your management to adopt this change? Do you think it will work? Will it help Project Managers to grow their skillsets this way, rather than executing projects in similar fashion one after the other?

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