I understand Project Management as the discipline of implementing strategy. A strategic plan exists first as an idea and then typically as a document that is shared with those whose job is to move ideas into reality. In business, strategy takes on dimension in the triangle of conflicting elements – human resources, financial resources and time.
If you manage an economy of any size that triangle is the threshing floor where outcomes are determined. The question at the outset of any enterprise remains, will this flat idea take on a workable shape in the round world? Project Management increases the odds it could. Learning this skill increases the odds of success. This is the WORK it UP premise.
One of the inestimably valuable benefits of serving at WORK it UP is the pleasure of repeatedly being surprised in discovering first-hand the enormous talent, creativity, wisdom, knowledge, energy, enthusiasm, initiative, drive, determination and outright power on my constituents.
We share in common a horrifying moment of reality in the history of our country. The lives and careers we have spent our adulthood building diligently have been taken from us and we are all confronted with two sources of consternation – the limits of our existence and social hindrances that impede our ability to discover a new life and an amended career plan we may once more prosper within.
We belong to this new ‘Club’ in which members become painfully aware of just how great a need exists in times of adversity to join together in an un-accustomed state of unity, summon our collective resolve and abilities to discover how we may successfully lift ourselves out of the economic hole we have been cast into and take others with us in our individual and collective extrication process.
It is a curious and confounding experience to observe our nation from the bottom of this hole. It makes plain how little those who went unscathed by the market collapse in 2008 understand about the urgent need for our society as a whole to re-frame the way we live, work and serve our fellow citizens.
Politicians, government agencies, social services resources struggle mightily to address the problem but they too come up short. We very quickly learn that no one has anticipated that members of our own society could bring us all to this moment of peril in which families disintegrate, homes are taken away, credit is unavailable, small business is cast aside and no sufficient provision has been made to sustain us in these outcomes.
What is deeply motivating is that none of the hundreds of the colleagues I have been honored to work with in the past year ever expresses the sentiment that they are victims. WORK it UP is the place you come to, figuratively and literally, if you determine that what you had to offer in the way of hard-won wisdom, innate talent, ability, skills and determination to succeed transcends all the possible forms of oppression and denial the world hurls at you while you look up from the bottom of the pit.
WORK it UP was a flat idea that presented itself at the right moment when its founders took responsibility for their own lives and those of their fellow Mainers to create an innovative solution to help all those imperiled by the economic collapse. Since the solution they proposed had never existed before there was very real concern it would not succeed.
What makes this organization grow, expand, change and become stronger is the social-entrepreneurial spirit. It is a belief which insists there is a mutually beneficial solution that can fix this problem if we practice what we know – that flat ideas can take on the dimension of our round world, succeed and become more round like a snowball rolling downhill accumulating in size, mass and momentum if enough people push together to help that happen.
Eighteen months later WORK it UP continues to grow on a self-prescribed diet of creativity, determination, generous inclusion for others and certitude. Our members have a sense of certainty about the proposition that everyone who is willing to whole-heartedly add their gifts to the process of designing and implementing a strategy – in this instance, for social change and economic development – will share in the positive outcome that this level of conscious effort will inevitably produce.
At WORK it UP Project Management is the primary tool we use to improve our lives, our careers and our society – one set of challenges at a time. Our hearts and minds are dedicated to this effort every day and as a consequence we’re not only erasing that hole we once stood in, we’re building the new world that fills in that hole and prevents it from ever opening up again.
We invite you to join us and add your gift to this innovative process of implementing the return of prosperity to Maine for everyone. Join the professionals at WORK it UP who are themselves the abiding treasure of Maine.
