How chopping wood for the winter can learn us a few thing about Project Management

This summer I've done the usual chopping of wood for the winter. It's hard to imagine that it will soon be cold again and without wood you don't survive. What I like most about chopping wood is the piece at mind you enter when hitting the piece of wood with your axe. You put up yet another piece of wood and aim the axe, try to hit the small crack that indicates a possible easy hit. If you're lucky you will nail it the first time. Usually the wood is to big to crack the first time but by hitting it over and over again it finally gives up. Then when you're finished it's ready to be stacked in the wood shed. And later on it gets cold, that's when you're really thankful that you really did all the hard work of chopping wood.

What can this learn us about project management? Well, not much to be honest was my first thought. Then, after some thinking it hit me that perhaps it could. Not that it is in any way remarkable, but still it can give us some placeholder for remebering the important things while doing a project.
First of all we have to plan. Without planning the collection of wood and then where to chop and finally where to stack it for best drying there's no way to succeed. Careful planning is a good start.
Then it comes to the careful selection of tools. Without a good axe you're lost in the wood chopping business. There's no way you can even succeed with the first piece of wood if you don't have a real good axe. I personally prefer "Gränsfors" which is the Rolls-Royce among the axes. Select the tools you need for the project, train yourself to use them effectively and you can improve the possibilities of a successful project several times.
Iterate over and over again. If it's one thing you learn from chopping wood, it is to iterate. You pich up the wood, chop it in two pieces, pick up one of the pieces and chop it again. Repeat this until all the pieces are small enough to fit in the stove. Then pick up the next piece of wood and repeat the same procedure.
A colleague of mine once said to turn every wheel on the project a little bit one at a time until all wheels were turned 360 degrees. Then the project is finished, not before. It's exactly the same when chopping wood. Do it one piece of wood at a time until you've done them all.
Continues process improvement is seen in chopping wood. For every piece of wood you try to find the best crack and hit it as hard as you can. Every time you fail you try to figure out what could I've done better and the next piece of wood you practice that new knowledge. After a while you get better and better at it. It's exactly the same in project management. To be a great project manager you need to continously improve the project and it's processes.
Finally you have to think through the whole product lifecycle, not just the project lifecycle. If you fail to chop the wood in the right size they wont fit in the stove during the winter. You have to fix the wood by cutting it into smaller pieces while the family is freezing inside. That's the same thing you do in software where you fix the bugs during real production. No, have the whole product lifecycle in front of you and it gets much easier to plan and execute the project.

To summarize what I've said here. Compare project management with the art of chopping wood. Handle these parameters in your project as during chopping wood:

• Plan the project
• Select the right tools
• Iterative project, rolling wave planning
• Continous process improvement
• Have the complete product lifecycle in mind when doing the project, not only the project lifecycle