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Business coaching takes a lot of its fundamental metaphors from the world of sports and competition. After all, running a business is, in many ways, the ultimate in competitive trainings and managing your assets and workforce 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 examples from sports that you can take with you into project management training, on joint effort, development, and the limits of planning.

In football, a lot of time is spent studying offensive game tape of rival competitors. Doing this gives information on trends, on an individual basis, that will let you predict which way a running back will make a move, how a receiver runs their courses, 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 block tackles going left or right. With enough research, you can rebuild some of the play-book used by the opposing team; the very similar applies to project management and market examination for your company. Studying what the competition are doing in your market area is critical for figuring out how to make complementary goods, or position your goods and services as a viable alternative. Look for tendencies, like when they buy advertising and what sorts of adverts they buy. When you look at your competitor's adverts, put on your project manager cap, and try to retrace the method they took to make that advert - look at when the advert appeared, look at the creation time for the advert to find it's submission date, and then look back from there (as all project managers do), going back in time; with this you can even make a decent measure on your opponent's merchandise development cycle. In this way, you're using project management procedures as a 'defensive coordinator', trying to expect the offensive actions your opponent will make.

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

Now that you've taken a 'defensive coordinator's' view, it's time to turn to the offense. You've identified the weak sections in the market. Now it's time to look at separated aspects that can hinder your tactics. Using the information you gained from openly available resources, try to gauge when your opposition is going to throw out a new product release; based on what type of goods they make, this may have a seasonal feature to it. In particular, look for new upgrades of existing applications; particularly in the desktop application area, there's a general one and a half year to two year release stage. If you've got a new manufactured good coming out that has active competition, you want to time your release at the hypothetical point in time where the clients using rival goods have learned all the features and are demandingmore.

In sports, an offensive controller does phase two project management. The objectives have been set, now it's time to practice, practice, practice and make certain that your team is prepared to carry out your strategy, and your vision. This means exercising, and repetition on the practice 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 depends on a quarterback who can analyse the entire field quickly, and go through programmed 'reads' of the positions of his flanker, slot and center receivers, while being conscious that his outlet receivers at tight end and running back are on hand for a shorter pass. While this sounds cerebral, and oddly calm to read, it's all being done in about three seconds after the snap, and the quarterback is depending on his offensive linemen to create time to make his reads, and to provide his receivers extra time to get farther down the field.

In less time than it takes to read 'OK, slot one - covered, slot two covered, flanker covered, to the tight end over the middle. Dump it.' a quarterback has to collect the information, make the decision, and avoid being crushed by a 300-pound defensive end or 250 pound line backer. Making certain that a quarterback can gather this information, and make the right decisions is main project management as related to managing your workers. You have to give them the skills and the judgment to assemble information about the business, and give them pre-programmed series of preferences that they can choose from when circumstances demand a decision now, rather than later!and if that sounds like preparing up your negotiators and sales representatives to 'make the call' on a deal, it should - it's the same kind of proficiency. It just engrosses money rather than 300-pound men storming after you to do bodily harm.

One thing that coaches are able to do that doesn't perform as well for business in project management contexts, is cover up of intent 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 run the ball, it's worth to bring eight men up to the line of scrimmage to stuff the run. If the offense is expected to throw the football, you drop into a zone coverage package, or you try to rush the passer with down linemen storming the quarterback; this puts the best on the offense to conceal 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 part of the ball, it's worth to hide a blitz with zone coverage packages (they're called zone-blitz packages), so that the quarterback's last second play corrections can be turned awry. While this sort of thing has some application in business, and it's a valuable thought training (following Napoleon's mantra of 'Numerous times a day, I ask myself 'What would I do if the rival appeared in an unexpected place?'), it doesn't run as well in business because the rules of engagement are more wide open.

More resources on project management training and the basics of sports