⚽ Is your project a Wrexham, a Chelsea or a Sheffield Wednesday? ⚽

How does running your project compare to managing a football team?

I was reading an article over the weekend, referring to Reuben Amorim’s recent outburst and dismissal over his manager / head coach title. The article went into how most clubs are structured and where the responsibility and authority lie - particularly around strategy and recruitment, and the difference between managers and head coaches. This got me thinking about projects. The project manager, like the football manager or head coach, is responsible for team performance, yet very rarely in my experience does a PM have authority over project team recruitment. We are given the team we have, and we have to manage external parties as well.

I then started to think about how various football clubs are structured.

For example, could we consider Chelsea as a programme and the men’s first team competitions (Premier league, FA Cup, League Cup and the Champions League) as four projects each season within that programme, along with the Chelsea Women’s Team, the U21s, the Academy and other projects? There should then be some strategic alignment of the benefits and objectives of each project towards the overall objectives of the business, along with significant negative and positive risks that exist to each of those objectives. There will be a range of targets and key metrics for each project (and wouldn’t we PMs love access to performance analytics on project team members in the way that football player performance can be assessed?).

Chelsea’s new head coach (not manager) is responsible for the performance of the team on the four projects, but not for recruitment or for strategy (signing young players on long-term contracts and sending them out on loan). Geeky I know, but I would love to see something like Chelsea FC set out in documentation similar to that which we would expect on our own programmes and projects.

I use Chelsea as an example above, but consider also Wrexham, with its very different strategy (and stakeholders) and a very different approach to recruitment. What would their programme and project documentation look like?

And finally, please spare a thought and consider my beloved Sheffield Wednesday - almost destroyed by insufficient and unsatisfactory governance, missing all sorts of targets and losing good PMs and team members as a result.

Time for a re-baselining! 🎉

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