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Business coaching takes a lot of its fundamental similes from the world of sports and contest. After all, running a business is, in many ways, the ultimate in competitive exercises and managing your resources and employees is a lot like coaching players of your own.

Like most other endeavors in life, project management-type thinking can really help, and there are lots of lessons from sports that you can take with you into project management training, on teamwork, preparation, and the restrictions of planning.

In football, a lot of time is spent studying offensive game footage of opposing team. Doing this gives information on drives, on an individual basis, that will let you calculate which way a running back will make a move, how a receiver rushes their routes, whether or not a given offensive lineman can be made to bite on a hip break, or if a running back is better able to break tackles going left or right. With enough research, you can rebuild some of the play-book used by the opposing squad; the same applies to project management and market research for your trade. Studying what your competitors are doing in your market area is critical for figuring out how to make complementary products, or place your products and services as a doable option. Look for drifts, like when they buy advertising and what type of adverts they buy. When you look at your opponent's adverts, put on your project manager bonnet, and try to retrace the means they took to make that advert - look at when the advert appeared, look at the creation time for the advert to find it's construction date, and then look back from there (as all project managers do), going back in time; with this you can even make a decent gauge on your adversary's artifact development phase. In this way, you're using project management skills as a 'defensive coordinator', trying to anticipate the offensive moves your competitor will make.

To research personal players, look for who the marketing is intended for. Ask yourself if that ad would work for you, for your customers, or for a unit of clients you'd like to reach. Then ask yourself why the ad works in those situations (or, more importantly, if it doesn't, why it doesn't. Like any coach in a competition, a good project manager has to be alert to the slips - the missed blocks and failed executions - of his adversary. Plus, you can learn from other's mistakes this way, which is always less expensive than making your own.)

Now that you've taken a 'defensive coordinator's' standpoint, it's time to switch to the offense. You've identified the fragile areas in the market. Now it's time to look at isolated elements that can hinder your campaign. Using the data you gained from openly accessible resources, try to guess when your opposition is going to release a new product; based on what class of products they make, this may have a seasonal aspect to it. In particular, look for new versions of existing applications; particularly in the desktop application field, there's a general 18-month to two year release phase. If you've got a new manufactured good coming out that has existing competition, you want to measure your release at the theoretical point in time where the consumers using competing products have learned all the features and are demandingmore.

In sports, an offensive coach does phase two project management. The goals have been set, now it's time to exercise, exercise, exercise and make sure that your team is prepared to perform your strategy, and your idea. This means training, and putting into practice on the field; running a football play is very much a series of coordinated moves - everyone has to be at the right place at the right time; the Walsh offense in professional football is the embodiment of this; its proficiency relies on a quarterback who can analyse the entire field quickly, and go through programmed 'reads' of where his flanker, slot and center receivers are, while being aware that his outlet receivers at tight end and running back are on hand for a shorter pass. While this seems cerebral, and oddly calm to read, it's all being executed in about three seconds after the snap, and the quarterback is relying on his offensive linemen to create time to make his reads, and to provide his receivers extra time to get farther down the field.

'OK, hole one - covered, hole two covered, flanker covered, to the tight end over the middle. Dump it.'; in less time than it takes to read this a quarterback has to gather the information, make the decision, and avoid being crushed by a 300-pound defensive end or 250 pound line backer. Making sure that a quarterback can gather this information, and make the right choices is key project management as related to managing your personnel. You have to give them the abilities and the judgment to assemble data about the trade, and give them pre-programmed sets of preferences that they can choose from when circumstances demand a choice now, rather than later!and if that sounds like training up your negotiators and sales representatives to 'make the call' on a sale, it should - it's the same sort of proficiency. It just engrosses money rather than 300-pound men storming after you to do physical damage.

One thing that coaches are able to do that doesn't perform as well for business in project management contexts, is concealment of purpose and plans. In sports, substantial effort is spent on making a defensive or offensive team look distinct from what it in fact is. For example, if you know that the offense is going to do a running pass, it's worth to bring eight men up to the line of scrimmage to block the run. If the offense is likely to throw the football, you drop into a zone covering defense, or you try to rush the passer with down linemen storming the quarterback; this puts the best on the offense to mask the nature of the play as much as possible, and to get the offense to delay on their strategy in reaction to your formation. Similarly, on the defensive side of the ball, it's worth to hide a blitz with zone covering packages (or zone-blitz packages as they're called), so that the quarterback's last second play changes can be turned skewed. While this sort of thing has some purpose in business, and it's a valuable thought exercise (following Napoleon's mantra of 'Numerous times a day, I ask myself 'What would I do if the foe appeared in an unexpected place?'), it doesn't run as well in business because the rules of engagement are more extensive.

More resources on project management training and the use of sports management skills

- George Purdy