Hilary Kinney PMP - Project Management for Parents: Engage the Family, Build Teamwork, Succeed Together

Project Management for Parents

Hilary was my project director when she became a parent. As an outstanding employee and a devoted mother, she managed special projects for The Ritz-Carlton, a $6 billion company. Her passion and dedication to her job and family are inspiring. I remember saying to her I dont know how you do it. Now you can find all of her secrets in this book, and how she uses project management to create excellence at work and organize life at home.

Herv Humler, Chairman Emeritus and Founding Partner, The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company

Hilary Kinney has nailed it! Her book should be mandatory reading for anyone who has or is planning to have children. I have been married for 54 years and have three children. Where was a book like this when I was facing the daunting challenge of raising my children in a high-risk environment? Sadly, I had to learn how to achieve a successful family unit the hard waytrial and error. I eventually got to implementing most of Hilarys suggestions, but not before having to recover from numerous errors.

Hilarys book provides an articulate description of the suggested approach and the supporting actions that will increase the probability of achieving a strong family team. As a successful project manager for five decades, I am ashamed to admit that I never thought of applying proven project management techniques to my raising a family project. The insights provided in this book will save parents immeasurable time as they strive to nurture their children.

Lee R. Lambert, Project Management Institute (PMI) Fellow, a Founder of the Project Management Professional (PMP) Certification Program and Vice President Knowledge Transfer, Roeder Consulting

Hilary is one of the best project managers I have ever worked with, and she has a true passion for quality and leading successful projects. Hilary was instrumental in establishing the Program Management Oce at The Ritz-Carlton. Hilary's breadth of knowledge has made her successful in leading multiple types of projects as well as developing new tools and processes. Whether in the workplace or "real life", Hilary makes project management come alive as well as practically apply to many of life's challenges.

Len Wolin, Corporate Vice President, Global Hotel Operations, Club Quarters Hotels

PROJECT

MANAGEMENT

for Parents

Engage the FAMILY

Build TEAMWORK

Succeed TOGETHER

HILARY KINNEY, PMP

NEW YORK

LONDONNASHVILLEMELBOURNEVANCOUVER

PROJECT MANAGEMENT for Parents

Engage the Family, Build Teamwork, Succeed Together

2022 Hilary Kinney PMP

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To all the parents, stepparents, guardians,
and caregivers doing the best we can.

We are enough for our kids.

The idea for this book came to me during the global coronavirus pandemic in 2020. With schools, oces, and childcare centers closed, parents became teachers and full-time caregivers while still being expected to do their regular jobs. Families struggled, and many became overwhelmed by the workload.

As a project manager familiar with process improvement, I realized that many of the concepts I apply at work can also be valuable at home. Business concepts from project and change management can help us analyze our family lives to make them run more smoothly, whether during a crisis like a pandemic or just the normal rhythm of our daily lives.

Ive spent most of my career in project management for a global Fortune 500 company. Ive worked on projects ranging from technology and system rollouts to product and service launches, event management, and labor eciency initiatives. These projects were extremely complicated, encompassing hundreds of tasks, costing millions of dollars, and affecting some 7,000 different business units globally.

I started working in project management in 2003 and have been a certified project management professional (PMP) since 2007. I love project management and the theories behind why we do the work that we do. I am fascinated by all the different parts of various systems and how they all fit together to create successful teams that accomplish big things.

In my personal life, my biggest project was the beginning of my parenting story: adoption. It was a lengthy, emotional project with extensive legal and administrative requirements. My husband and I began the process in the United States with lots of interviews, paperwork, and inspections. There was so much documentation to complete that at one point I joked it was like getting a graduate degree. However, after a year, nothing had happened; we were still no closer to being matched with a child. We then submitted an application to Ethiopia, which has a different set of legal and administrative requirements. However, that country later stopped approving international adoptions, and so we applied for adoption in Uganda. This required a third set of paperwork. Fortunately, my project management experience enabled me to keep track of the long lists of tasks and deadlines.

At this point, our adoption project had been underway for three years in three different countries, but we felt like we were spinning our wheels. It was a disappointing Christmas that year because we had expected to be parents by then. However, little did we know that a miracle was happening at that very moment!

We received a call on New Years Day that there might be a child for us in the United States. A baby boy had been born on Christmas Day! One month later, my husband and I met our beautiful son! It was an amazing moment; after three years of waiting, we had finally become adoptive parents.

I became a mother later in life, and because I had always greatly enjoyed my career, I wanted to continue working when I became a parent. However, I also wanted to be available for my son and have time to focus on being a mother. I had to take a look at our priorities and capabilities, our family landscape. As the mother of a very active boy, my involvement level needed to be pretty high. I was also assisting my aging mother, along with managing her and my familys medical issues. In project management we acknowledge the constraints of every projectsomething well discuss in more detail laterwhich proved a good lesson in my personal life. I could not do it all and had to reprioritize my time.