Monorails and Project Management

I was fascinated by the documentary on monorails on TV yesterday afternoon. The Schwebebahn (Monorail) in Wuppertal, West Germany was built over 100 years ago and continues to demonstrate the following significant advantages of monorail transportation:

1. It is unobtrusive to traffic. Urban monorails run above the traffic, unlike buses and trams. They reduce traffic instead of adding to the congestion.
2. Provide inexpensive and safe public transportation which is a big advantage over buses and trams.
3. Is a tourist attraction.

Other monorails offer additional benefits.
1. They can be fully automated
2. They run silently, therefore can run close to urban housing, such as high-rise apartments in cities without the noise from heavy traffic.

Obviously, monorail transportation is an under-utilized form of public transportation and we should be erecting more monorail systems.

The purpose of this post is not about the benefits about monorails. It is about the lessons we can learn from monorails for project management.

Status reports are a part of project management. The amount of time and energy consumed to produce scorecards, dashboards and PowerPoint slides varies on your organization, and can be a significant drain on your resources.

However, think about the Schwebebahn as you go about reporting status on your projects this week. How can you make your weekly project reporting process:
1. Above the traffic? (Get the reports out, without congesting the resources doing the work?)
2. Fully automated? (Without manual copy-and-paste from Excel to PowerPoint?)
3. Inexpensive? (Outcome of point 2)
4. A tourist attraction? (OK - Maybe this objective is a little far-fetched, for a status report)


Look up the Schwebebahn on Google and learn about this amazing world of monorails. Then you will see the benefits of applying monorail concepts to your project management services.