Project Management Basics (Episode 1)

Painful. Only one word can truly describe the abysmal lack of planning by the two teams. No effective brainstorming and no objectives lead to a sorry performance of 83 total subscriptions to Sam’s Club: a number they could have surely met with their own meager ad campaign.

A high-level view of project management breaks down into five phases:

Initiating: Recognizing that a project or phase should begin and committing to do so.
Planning: Devising and maintaining a workable scheme to accomplish the business need that the project was undertaken to address.
Executing: Coordinating people and other resources to carry out the plan.
Controlling: Ensuring that project objectives are met by monitoring and maintaining progress and taking corrective action when necessary.
Closing: Formalizing acceptance of the project or phase and brining it to an orderly end.

From the project management vantage point, the first task can only be viewed as a complete disaster. After Trump initiated their project for them, there was little if no project planning, reasonable execution on a non-existent project plan, no control measures to ensure that the team’s achieved numbers that they thought would score them a win, and the closing processes ended with a bang as Trump nearly fired two people on the first day.

There should have been extensive discussions regarding a SMART objective: Specific, Measurable, Agreed, Reachable, and Time-bound. Tarek or Allie should have said, What will it take to win the task? Fifty new subscriptions? One hundred?

Since it’s impossible to go through the whole nine yards of project management, the project managers should have at least employed Management by Objective (MBO) where 1) an objective is established, 2) the objective is periodically evaluated, and 3) corrective measures are taken. Instead, there was no objective, no evaluation, and no corrective measured. We were only a couple martinis away from Trump firing all 18 candidates for incompetence and moving to LA for season six.