A few years ago I began studying project management. It was one of the things which has most helped me out in working online. It turns out there are huge similarities between how we work online and what professional project management teaches. But most people who work online do it in an unorganized, unstructured manner and aren’t very effective as a result. Some time spent studying project management will give you some insights into both little and big things which make a big difference towards your effectiveness online.

This stuff works - I was the guy who told Rich Schefren about it after I began learning it. He was initially quite skeptical. Then a few months later he began teaching it in his training programs. As of lately it appears that the theory of constraints has become a core part of his business - and theory of constraints is directly from Project Management. Rich - tell me if I’m wrong, but I think this has had a big impact on your business?

The core training for project management is called the PMP, or Project Management Professional. They have a book called the PMBOK, which is updated every year. In actual practice the PMBOK is not very useful; its written like a guide for rocket scientists, not people who want to learn how to manage projects. In addition, IMHO, the PMP goes a litlte further than it needs to as well. But its a great foundation to learn reasonable well.

So my approach was to study for the PMP exam as if I would take it, but not bother to actually do it (I don’t care if anyone thinks I am a PMP certified guy, I just wanted the results!).

Here’s how I would suggest you do it:

1. Get a coach from guru.com. You can find amazing people for $25/hr who want to learn to work online and want some extra income. One guy I had was a PMP certified guy from HP’s printer division. The other I had was finishing his doctorate from GWU and was a full time project manager for a software company. Between the two of them I got differing opinions on how things should be done. Both taught me a huge amount and it was tremendously helpful. And while i didn’t pay a lot of money, the guy from GWU learned from what I was doing and now runs his own internet project managemnt business from Bolivia.

2. Get these two books:
a) PMP: Project Management Professional Exam Study Guide by Kim Heldman
b) PMP Exam Prep, Fifth Edition: Rita’s Course in a Book for Passing the PMP Exam (Paperback) by Rita Mulcahy

You use Rita’s book as the exam text - you need to be able to answer all the questions from her book. And use the study guide to learn how to answer them. It may be useful to have the PMBOK as well to learn from, but its not critical. It may be useful to pick up a couple of other books as well just to round out your knowledge.

One thing I did which turned out not to be useful - I tried learning how to use MS project; my idea was to become an expert at MS Project and then I would be able to manage projects. I didn’t listen to the people who told me that MS project didn’t matter and it was all about the fundamentals. It turns out they were right. Now, several years later, I don’t use MS Project because its too complex. I use programs which are more lightweight.

I spent several months on this fairly intensively and its paid off bigtime. You gain massive leverage over everything you’re doing because you can get your work done faster and more efficiently.

In the mid 1800’s John D Rockefeller founded Standard Oil, which later became the foundation for almost the entire oil industry.  He created the first real national corporation, and later, the first international corporation.  There were no laws for setting this up back then, so they had to deal with a lot of complexity and resistance.  Before Standard Oil was created in the 1800’s, all business was local small business.   There was no real nationwide business.

Since that time we have become used to large corporations in every part of our lives, for example, Microsoft, Citicorp, Hewlett Packard, Disney and Wal-Mart. 

Is it changing?

The internet is changing some of this, and is flattening how we work.  Instead of requiring hugely human intensive businesses, online, we’re now working with small, highly leveraged teams.  And instead of large corporations, on the internet the teams are relatively small.  Look at what Markus Frind has done with PlentyOfFish.com, or the HotOrNot.com guys, or Drew Curtis with Fark.  All these guys control as much traffic as a television station with few to no employees.  Even Google, one of the very largest online corporations only has 11,000 employees, compared to Wal-Mart, which has 1,800,000.

The ease of working remotely and connecting with and working with people in new ways is driving this on the internet, and some of the freelancer sites are leading the way.  For example, Odesk, with its outsourcing model, is a company that can allow individuals to organize themselves into teams and work remotely together as an entire company.  This model doesn’t scale particularly well – it is hard to have people working from different locations and have them collaborate as effectively as a team based in a single office.

The few cases where this works is when the collaboration is very simple.  A prime example is a company named LiveOps.  LiveOps provides phone support for large companies.  So if you’re Dominos, and you want to shorten the time it takes to answer the phones, you route all your calls to LiveOps.  LiveOps in turn recruits work from home people to answer the phones.  Their workers like this because they can work on a flexible schedule. Because LiveOps has so many people, and the concept is simple, the model works incredibly well for both sides and can scale.  LiveOps ends up with a huge team of work from home phone operators based around the country and can shift volume according to demand, and companies needing phone support can easily route it all via LiveOps.

So while LiveOps can work as a mega corporation because it has a very simple model, I think we’re going to see more growth of small businesses interfacing with each other in the future not less, where fewer people control more of the information that is passed around the world.  A successful website is incredibly high leverage and that doesn’t require a lot of people. 

So my question to you is, for the internet, are we heading back to the early 1800’s where small business ruled?