By Dave Prior for Scrumalliance.org

On my first day of work on a job where my very official job title was listed as “Project Manager”, a stressed out, old, bearded guy took me and the other newly minted PM into a room to teach us how to do our job. The first thing he said was, “When I am done with you, everything you do will be a project. You’ll be unable to look at the world any other way.” Truer words were never spoken. Looking at the world as a series of smaller tasks, with dependencies, a baseline, and a critical path invaded every corner of my brain. I stopped brushing my teeth and started executing a series of steps, which had dental hygiene as a measure of success. A few years later, after months of study, I passed the PMP exam and began trying to impose my “enlightened” approach on the rest of the world with results that were occasionally successful, but mostly, not so much. Read more bei Scrumalliance.