I recently came across the idea of having a project management mindset. I think this is a great idea. If you treat the responsibilities and tasks in your life as projects, you can bring project management approaches and principles to bear in your life. In fact, you can approach projects in your life as either standard projects or agile projects. You can also actively manage risks in your life and have a plan for change.

Standard Approach to Projects

You can handle a responsibility in your life as a project. To do so, take your project through the five phases of the project lifecycle: initiation, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling, and closeout. This will have you creating a strong project plan up front, and then working your plan over time to bring your project to completion.

The initiation phase is where you decide if you will move ahead with a project. A good question to ask in this phase is: “Do I have the capacity?” In other words, do you have the time, money, and other resources necessary to complete the project? If the answer is no, you can choose not to take on that responsibility in your life.

When initiating a project, you can create a project charter, which is a document that identifies what the project is, who the project stakeholders are (i.e. who the project is for), what is in and out of scope for the project (i.e. the work you will and will not do for the project), and more. Gathering all of this information up front is one of the keys to leading a successful project.

After the initiation phase, you enter the planning phase, where you outline all of the work that needs to be done for the project. Here you can create a work breakdown structure to capture all of the work that needs to be done. You can also put all the tasks you identify in your work breakdown structure into a schedule with dependencies. This is how you will know how long the project will take to complete and what you need to do to complete the project.

Once you have your plan, it is time for the execution phase. This is where you do the actual work for your project. And once the work has begun, you enter the monitoring and controlling phase, where you track your progress as you do the work. Tracking your work is key to knowing how close you are to completing your project, and it helps you to know if you are falling behind or making progress.

Finally, when you project is completed, you enter the closeout phase. This is where you tie up any loose ends on your project and complete any outstanding tasks. In the business world, this is also where you would hand off the project deliverables to the stakeholders.

This approach to project management is great when the work you need to do is clear up front and you don’t expect any major changes to the requirements during the life of the project. This allows you have a clear plan at the outset and to have that plan drive the project over its lifetime.

Agile Approach to Projects

Another way to approach responsibilities in your life is to treat them as agile projects. One way to do this is to have a product backlog (i.e. a master list of tasks), and to work in sprints. A sprint is a block of time, such as 2 or 3 weeks, where you work on a subset of your product backlog.

Unlike a standard approach to projects, you don’t do a lot of up front planning at the start of your project. Instead, you start out by brainstorming the work you expect to complete in your project, and you capture that work in a list of tasks called your product backlog. Then you schedule your first sprint to work on a subset of those tasks.

At the end of each sprint, you typically have a deliverable to hand over to the stakeholders for your project. After that, you choose a new subset of the remaining work on your product backlog to assign to your next sprint. Then you start your next sprint and work exclusively on the tasks assigned to that sprint.

Agile works well when you don’t have a clear picture at the start for all of the work you need to do. This is where the product backlog comes in handy. As you work through a sprint, you may learn of additional work you need to do. If you decide that this work is required, you can add it as a task on your product backlog. You can later add that work to a new sprint and work on that task as part of your next sprint instead of constantly added new work to your current sprint.

For example, you could handle the organizing of an event as an agile project. You can think of everything you need to do to run a successful event and add it to a backlog of tasks (i.e. your product backlog). Then you can schedule your first sprint by choosing a subset of those tasks to work on.

In your first sprint, you could focus exclusively on finding a venue for your event. That could be a two-week period where you actively contact organizations to find a suitable venue. At the end of that sprint, you could move on to a second sprint where you focus on finding all of the presenters for your event. Then a third sprint could be arranging for all of the food and volunteers for your event.

Of course, you could work on more than one major task during each sprint depending on your time and who you have to work with. It all comes down to your capacity and what you have time for in each of your sprints.

Risk Management

Another part of having a project management mindset is anticipating risks and having a plan for dealing with a risk when it occurs. And risks can be either be positive or negative. You can plan for negative risks (i.e. threats) that will potentially derail your plans, and you can also plan for positive risks (i.e. opportunities).

When you are working on something in your life, treat it as a project and brainstorm everything that could potentially go wrong. Also anticipate any opportunities that could have positive effects on your project.

Once you have your list of risks, create plans for how to deal with them. For example, if you are planning a wedding for a friend, one risk could be bad weather that could disrupt your goal to have an outside wedding reception. The plan for dealing with this risk could be to book a venue that has both indoor and outdoor options for the reception. Or you could plan to have tents as a backup so that the wedding reception can still happen outside if it rains.

One way to manage risks is to identify the probability that they will occur and the impact they will have if they do occur. This can help you choose which risks to plan for.

For example, you can scale the probability of a risk occurring as either low, medium, or high. And the impact could also be either low medium, or high. Once you have identified the probability and impact of each risk, then you can decide which risks you will plan for, and which risks are safe to ignore.

Change Management

Yet another aspect of project management is planning for change. In life, change is inevitable, and you can have a plan to manage that change.

For example, if you decide to develop an iPhone app for a friend, you could create a plan up front about what features to include in the app. You could also create a plan for how to handle scope creep, or in other words, requests from your friend for new features once the development of the app is underway.

If you are treating this as a proper project, you will have outlined up front the time frame for your project and the features that are in scope (i.e. the features you agreed to include in the app). Knowing your friend, he will probably have ideas for new features, so you can outline at the start of your project that he must make a formal request if he wants to add a new feature once the project is under way.

When he requests a new feature, you can tell him what impact it will have on the project and that you and he will both have to agree on the changed timeline if he wants to add the new feature to the product. You can also make an agreement to not support a feature request that would be too drastic or not in line with the original plan.

Ultimately, have an agreed upon process with your friend on how he will request a new feature and how it will be documented. Also agree on how final decisions will be made on if the new feature will be added.

Conclusion

Having a project management mindset is a great way to be more organized and to successfully complete projects in your personal life. You can approach the responsibilities and tasks in your life as agile projects and/or as more traditional projects where all of the planning happens up front.

Having a project management mindset also means you anticipate risks (both threats and opportunities), and that you have a plan for how to deal with them. You can identify both the probability and impact of those risks to help you choose which risks to manage. And by planning for these risks, you can be sure they won’t derail your project if (or when) they occur.

You can also create a plan to manage changes in your life. This can help you plan for how to incorporate changes into personal projects and a plan for whether you will or will not make changes when people have requests that would impact what you need or want to work on in your life.

Having a project management mindset is a great way to approach challenges in your life, and I encourage you to handle the responsibilities and tasks in your life as projects. You may just find that you become more organized and that you are more effective and productive in accomplishing your goals and in fulfilling your most important responsibilities.