Maybe I’m jaded. Maybe I’m confused. Maybe it’s inexperience. Maybe it’s poor management. Maybe it’s poor people.

But in my short experience it seems that when I’m pushing someone to get involved in a project, I’m doing most of the work. I can motivate someone to get involved with a project that they’re not initially excited about but after a few weeks, that fizzle goes away. Once the fizzle goes away, I’m the one that’s baby sitting, making sure work is getting done and making sure that the fizzle, that was once there, doesn’t go away. Many times the fizzle is long gone and they’re just doing the work so they don’t disappoint themselves or me.

Well, I think from now on, I’m going to look for people to bring ideas to me. I think I’ll wait to find the people that are willing to stick it out through the inevitable highs and lows. I’ll wait to see what ideas I want to get involved with rather than bringing ideas to people. I won’t try to change people’s minds or ideas until I’m completely sold on the people.

As I’ve said before, people are more important than ideas. Once I know I have solid people then I’ll share ideas. But I still won’t push ideas onto people. I’ll do my best to explain a vision and hope they catch fire… I’m not interested in the fizzle, I need to see the fire.

      

Leadership Is Enthusiasm

We find ourselves intrinsically attracted to passionate and excited people

Leaders often find themselves in familiar situations

Leaders are usually trend spotters. They see the trend and move toward that trend and merely ask people to “follow them”. The people would probably get there without the leader. But, in no way, is the leader worthless. Most people are followers and followers need leaders.

      

I was thinking about our many projects at iProv today during church. We’ve got a pretty solid process for managing our project but there are some hand-calculations that still have to be made.

As most of you know, the majority of my job is project management and new business. I can’t really teach you how to come up with creative solutions but I can talk just a little bit about project management. This blog entry is going to focus on proposal development, project evaluation, and break even points.

At iProv, we break projects into “days”. If your business breaks things into “hours”, you will have to do a little modifying.

Proposal Development
When you look at developing a project, use this formula

1. $ per day = (Amount of Money You Want Your Organization to put in it’s Pocket Each Day) + (Price of an Employee Per Day * Number of Employees Working)
2. Total Project Price = ($ per day) * (total number of days in the project)

Sure this is simple, but many people try to make this a lot more confusing. The “$ per day” is what the organization profits each day.

Break Even Date
After the customer agrees and signs off on the project, take a look at the start date and figure out what day the break even date is. You may tell a customer that the project will be done on January 1st. But, b/c the customer puts the project on the back burner, it won’t get done until March 1st. It’s fine b/c the customer doesn’t get mad at you but you’ve got to keep paying your employees each day. The longer the project goes on, the more it cuts into your organizations profits.

1. # of work days for break even = (Total Project Price) / [ Price of an Employee Per Day * Number of Employees Working ]

Project Evaluation
After the project is done you can evaluate the project and see what your organization made after the project was complete. To do this, just reverse the Proposal Development.

1. $ per day = (Total Project Price) / (Total # of days in the project)
2. net profit per day = ($ per day) – (employee price per day * Number of Employees)

Good luck on your next project!