I don’t know about you but I love BBC’s Masterchef, not just for the food and the cooking skills but the lessons it has for Project Managers.
And before I hear you scream “not another popular T.V program – tenuous Blog link story” please bear with me, bear with me.
First of all I love the passion. The contestants exude passion about food and cooking, we experience the love of their craft and their pain when their expectations are not met. One scowl off John is enough to reduce the strongest contestant to tears. As project managers we need to display the same level of passion for our project deliverables.
Secondly I love the drama of execution as the dish is put together to arrive at the nominated time, cooked perfectly, presented beautifully and demanding to be eaten. The time management skills on display would put the best project manager to shame and if we could deliver our projects to the same standard we would be very happy PM’s indeed.
Of course, like any project, things can go wrong and mistaking sugar for salt will end in disaster, a lesson in attention to detail there.
At the end there is only one winner but the runners up all learn from their mistakes, another attribute of good project managers.
