Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Take care when choosing an example for teaching. Often what seem to be great examples are terrible in that people concentrate on the unintended.

I have taken a lot of courses related to project management. I have taught a few. I have read a lot of books on project management, and, as well, I have written a few.

Teachers love to teach through examples. There are many examples of failed projects stemming from mistakes of the project managers. A few examples that I saw many times in courses include:

• Re-building the FAA traffic control system
• The C-17 Cargo Plane
• The Denver airport baggage handling system

Dated? Yes. These are old and many people won’t remember them. Hence, we need knew examples. Ah, government to the rescue with Health Care dot Gov. What a great example.

Ah, but Health Care dot Gov is a terrible example to use in a book or class.

Health Care, at least for now in the U.S., is a political issue. There are deep political and emotional divides about this. Using the web site project as a lesson in what to do wrong in project management will more than likely lead to political arguments. Students won’t learn about technology and technique as their emotions will clog their ears and preoccupy their minds.

Here is an example of a bad example for teaching.  I once attended a class where the topic of an exercise was, well, I can’t remember the topic of the exercise. What I remember is that the teacher created an example that was near and dear to the hearts of the students. It was so near and dear that three hours after class dinner the students were still arguing about the specifics of the situation at dinner. The lesson was something about taking notes or reading different sources of information or something, but no one saw that. The nearness and dearness filled the students with emotion.

Hence, the teacher and writer have a challenge. Find something familiar and pertinent as an example, but not too familiar and pertinent. This is not for the faint of heart.