Project Management Requires a Lot of Trust

Experts say that 50% of all jobs are project management, and to me, in destination marketing, it may be even higher.

But beyond the steps, good concept description, list of stakeholders, steps, timeline, milestones and deadline, project management requires a lot of trust.

Trust first of all that, when you send an email with a question, the other person will respond in a timely manner, either with the information requested or an alternative if that isn’t possible.

Trust that people will pay attention to the “wrangler,” or person keeping everyone on track.

Trust that people will bring up issues in time to seek alternative solutions.

This all breaks down way too often but rarely out of negligence or bad faith. The culprit is failure to communicate and either hoping for the best until it's too late to make a change or telling ourselves a story that we’ll somehow get to it... or being hesitant to share bad news. It all ends up in breakdowns.

Oh, there is one other culprit. People by nature don’t like deadlines. And without deadlines, project management doesn’t exist.