Fundamentals of Project Management, Third Edition

My Head Hurts

I once conducted a project management program for a company that made dolls for girls. Most of my group was women, and most of them were very creative, which means that they are primarily right-brain in their thinking. As you can easily understand, planning, scheduling, and control are more left-brained than right-brained. When we got to the scheduling material, one woman said, “My head hurts. I can’t do this stuff.”

She is not alone in this. Although I myself am primarily right-brained, I was fortunate to be educated as an engineer—which is an almost entirely left-brain curriculum—so I can do scheduling without getting a headache, but for some of you, this will be too much.

So one question to ask yourself is whether you need to ...