Closing research report

2020 Blog, Other

In our previous blog, we’ve talked about the goals, realisation of the project and the closing report of the EFOP-5.2.2-17 international tender. This blog post offers insight into the details of the research report.

Our research aims to map the usage of project management (PM) on a new field, family- and private life, its opportunities and current practice.

There are a multitude of examples showing that dedication and effort leads to success if the leading process is clear and easy to understand. However, it’s debatable what hampers people in using this well-tested and useful tool. Most likely the fact that they don’t know it, haven’t met it.

The solution seems simple: spreading knowledge related to PM in as wide an audience as possible. However, the whole picture became more complex for us when we realised that those that already know this logic and toolset from their work aren’t really using it in their private lives either. There are people who are assured in the efficiency of PM day by day, and think that they could make their lives more efficient with the same thought process and system.

The research also shows that those that know PM and those that plan in practice are two different types, and have a very small overlap between them.

Planners feel their lives are more organised, and 80% of them feel it’s actually successful as well. The advantage of planning is shown by the relation between organised efficiency and success: those that feel their lives are “very” organised and “very” successful have a 86,1% overlap between them.

Perhaps people will find even more initiative for planning when they hear that 22% of planners feel their lives are happy, while 78% feel it’s “very” happy. According to our data collection and research, the thought of “PLM – project perspective in everyday life” is a reasonable one as a concept, and there’s distinct demand for it in society. This isn’t just a feeling of lack on the individual’s side.

One of the most important tasks both on a social and a personal level in the following decades will be to educate competence development and collaborative problem solving, as seen from the various PISA test results of Hungary. Such competences can be obtained most easily by learning how to use the project perspective and management toolset. Reason being: problem solving assumes there’s a chain of thinking steps where the solution is reached from the problem in one consistent line, which we also call thought process. And in PM, we call it strategizing.

Our analysis also shows individual-level conclusions and morals. First and foremost, we need to mention the lack of knowledge about PM among youths.

This also supported how the younger generations are our main target groups, but we believe that we should approach an even younger group, all the way back to their grade school days. Naturally, pedagogy methods and a very simplified form of PM is necessary to match their age. On this area, we believe the current results of project education promising and simple to proceed with, having plenty of development potential, while our experiences suggest they end after elementary education.