“Barney, what do you do for a living?” – Random girl(s) in How I Met Your Mother

Project Management is the utilization of methods, knowledge, and experience to realize desired outcomes. Within the context of actual professional industries, project management can be applied to all of these fields — but as we have already know from the definition of a project in my previous post, not every task is a project.

In the show How I Met Your Mother, Barney Stinson is probably best known for the “plays” which he used to attract, disarm, and eventually seduce women. Some of these plans were extremely long-term, while others were shorter in nature, however they all had different outcomes in that he would be seducing a different girl. There were even plans which incorporated his friends’ eventual meddling and betrayal, which he had calculated into the timeline of the “play” and would often result in hilarious turns of fortune for himself.

Ultimately Barney understood his scope, how to manage his timing, and what resources he would have to employ or consume in order to achieve his goal — to get the girl. His inclusion of his friends in his ideas would be considered communication with external stakeholders. Though he was not always successful in his attempts, each of the “plays” which Barney took us through were projects.

In the television show and movie The A-Team, John “Hannibal” Smith coined his famous catch phrase, “I love it when a plan comes together.” As the project manager for The A-Team, Hannibal was most often responsible for coming up with the plan and how to execute. He would apply his knowledge of the environment, situation, and his team’s abilities to create the plan and provide the guidelines for the project to be conducted. He would typically use his understanding of these factors to devise a plan which would rescue a hostage or secure document from the bad guys. Of course, there were usually cool explosions too.

The act of applying industry standard frameworks and best practice methods is project management, and project management is what a project manager does. Project management is the science through which work is done, and through processes and deliverables that are tested throughout different projects we are able to create tools for project managers to use.

* If you have a Pinterest account, or not, definitely check out Ashley’s collection of material related to HIMYM! She’s got some stuff that I wasn’t able to find anywhere else on the internet.