Management lessons from the movie "Armageddon" (1998)

 

I watched Armageddon and liked it a lot for various reasons. To start with, it is a Sci-Fi Thriller with my perceived management lessons.

 

The story follows a group of oil drillers sent by NASA to stop an asteroid that will strike the world in eighteen days. The drillers are taught and trained to become astronauts (in a very comedic scene) and then sent to the asteroid to drop the nukes and blow it up. After that, a whole lot goes wrong.

 

Trust and team work: Bruce Willis is an oil driller named Harry Stamper. NASA knows that he is the only man to save the world. When approached by NASA, he tells them that "you may have heard good things about me, but I am nothing without my team" (or something like that). He has his group of drillers and geologists who he leads and he gives them their share of name and fame. This relationship of trust and team work is what every manager needs to get the best out of his team. Involving them in planning and decision taking increases the chances of success of the undertaken project.

 

You gotta have some kind of backup plan: NASA sends out the team in two different space ships loaded with tools and resources. There was a spcific mention about having a contingency plan for taking care of the unknown (risk). This is something that every manager needs to learn and practice.

 

Hiring plan: Best works with the best. One of the craziest team member tells about his brain power and says "I won the Westinghouse prize when I was 12, big deal. Published at 19, so what. I got a double doctorate from MIT at 22, Chemistry and Geology. I taught at Princeton for two and a half years.". Personally, I feel that the manager is supposed to groom his team well, so that he can take higher responsibilities.

 

Never lose your sense of humor - "You know we're sitting on four million pounds of fuel, one nuclear weapon and a thing that has 270,000 moving parts built by the lowest bidder.". Humor promotes the confidence and probability of success.

 

MS Project - Saving a Project Baseline

One of the PM at my organization asked me about the project baseline in MPP. It seems most of the project managers who use MPP use it as an excel workbook, one copy per project to maintain all the task and their status. If something changes, the plan changes and we save it as a copy of original (something like versioning). What is funnier is that people try to “diff” using CVS tools to find the changes in schedules.

One thing is sure, people use very limited features of MS MPP. I’ll try to educate them by “how to” on MPP. Here is one on saving a project baseline:

What is project baseline: Baseline is the term used for original (or approved updates) of the project plan. Baseline values are used to track progress against the plan.

How to save baseline in MS MPP:

1. On the project guide toolbar, click the “Track” button.

2. On the Track pane, click the save a baseline plan to compare with later versions link.

3. Click the save baseline button. MPP will save the baseline.

How to use the saved baseline in MS MPP:

On the view menu, click Table: Summary, and choose Variance to see the comparison with baseline. There is limit to number of baselines in one project file, however you may not require to compare more than 2-3 baselines at given point of time.