Nowadays, everyone needs to know the basics of project management. While the intentional usage of the project perspective became a rightful tool for the operation of enterprises and institutions, this is much less obvious, hence, it hasn’t spread to the lives of families and individuals. Even though a well-thought planning process and a well-structured implementation may help people who prepare to do a bigger, more novel task avoid a lot of annoyance.
Similarly to the economic life, when partaking in a new task in private life, one has to evaluate how important, and how much of a challenge it is for the individual in question. If the task is important, and not a routine task, meaning it’s also a greater challenge, then it has to be considered a project.
While in the case of a simple routine task, we only employ a small amount of tools (like a list for shopping), in the case of a project task, we need a lot more. For example, in case of a larger house-party, we can even separate phases (f. e. preparation, implementation, post-processing), and tasks within phases which are synchronised with each other. In addition, there are also the timetable, deadlines, communication, costs, etc. to be considered. A small project, like a vacation abroad, also needs further considerations, in terms of methods or management activities, including risk management and operation of procurement.
Hence, as we’re moving on the scale towards the large projects, the more and more complex methods and tools are needed in order to achieve success. In these cases, we can talk about working out detailed task plans, select milestones, and determine what partial goals we want to reach until any given deadline. We can assign deadlines and people in charge for the various tasks. If we employ any of these tools during organising our private lives, we’re already managing projects in the form of everyday tasks.
