Projects Matter.
For about a decade, we have worked in and with institutions of public education. We are leaders of public schools in our own right. We have graduate and post-graduate degrees in educational leadership, teacher certifications, and principal credentials in more than one state. We have endured year after year of “Get Better Faster,” “Schools Don’t Do it Alone,” and “360 Degree Leader” book studies. Every single school and school district, including those in which we lead, seems to focus solely on getting as good as possible as fast as possible. It’s an admirable goal.
Is there a better way forward?
The short answer is, Yes!
In all of our professional education, training, book studies, and keynote speaker experience, we have never been, not once, trained as project managers. The irony is, of course, that projects are what schools run on. Think about it. When was the last time your school initiative for improvement, turnaround, discipline, or teacher retention did not meet the elements of a project?
What are the elements of a project?
A project is a time-constrained event involving multiple key stakeholders to achieve a narrow and specific outcome or output. By that definition, almost everything a school does is a project. If that is true, then school leaders are project managers and senior leaders. Building-level leaders in public education often determine strategic goals, budget allocations, and operating plans once a year. Those annual decisions are the running of a school. The principal also determines which projects will be executed to achieve strategic goals. The latter makes him or her a project manager and portfolio manager in the truest sense.
Despite the obvious need to lead projects, almost no principal in the country is a certified project manager. If they were, schools would run on project lifecycles where budgets were built to achieve a project outcome rather than an ambiguous yearly goal.
Our process is to bring project management to your institution.
Embracing a project-management and project-leadership mindset will improve outcomes, outputs, and budget forecasting at every level of the institution. There is no way to get better faster, but there is a method to get better continuously, year after year.
We believe design drives every aspect of an organization. Project management and project portfolios allow a leader to design a high-performing, equitable system with purpose and intention. In short, projects matter most.
-The Penguins
