Business coaching takes a lot of its fundamental metaphors 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 enterprises in existence, project management-type thinking can truly help, and there are lots of lessons from sports that you can take with you into project management training, on cooperation, development, and the restrictions of planning.

In football, a lot of time is spent studying offensive game record of rival competitors. Doing this gives information on tendencies, on an individual footing, 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 break tackles going left or right. With enough analysis, you can recreate some of the play-book used by the opposing team; the same applies to project management and market research for your trade. Studying what the competition are doing in your market place is critical for figuring out how to make complementary products, or position your products and services as a doable substitute. Look for tendencies, like when they obtain advertising and what sorts of adverts they obtain. When you look at your opponent's adverts, put on your project manager hat, and try to retrace the method they took to make that advertisement - look at when the advertisement appeared, look at the manufacture time for the advertisement to find it's assembly 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 competitor's merchandise development phase. In this way, you're using project management procedures as a 'defensive coordinator', trying to foresee the offensive steps your competitor will make.

To analyse single players, look for who the advertising is directed at. Ask yourself if that advert would work for you, for your consumers, or for a part of clients you'd like to reach. Then ask yourself why the advert works in those circumstances (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 faults - the missed blocks and failed executions - of his rival. Plus, you can learn from other's faults this way, which is always less costly than making your own.)

Now that you've taken a 'defensive coordinator's' angle, it's time to change to the offense. You've identified the shaky areas in the market. Now it's time to look at isolated aspects that can hinder your plans. Using the data you gained from in public accessible resources, try to determine when your opposition is going to throw out a new product release; based on what type of products they create, this may have a periodical aspect to it. In particular, look for new issues of existing applications; particularly in the desktop application area, there's a general 18-month to two year release cycle. If you've got a new manufactured good coming out that has dynamic competition, you want to calculate your release at the theoretical point in time where the consumers using competing products have learned all the characteristics and are calling formore.

In sports, an offensive coach does phase two project management. The targets have been set, now it's time to train, train, train and make sure that your team is prepared to execute your scheme, and your vision. This means exercising, and repetition on the practice field; running a football play is very much a runs of coordinated moves - everyone has to be at the right spot 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 automated 'reads' of where his flanker, slot and center receivers are, while being aware that his outlet receivers at tight end and running back are open for a shorter pass. While this seems intellectual, and strangely 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 buy him time 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 flattened 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 workers. You have to give them the proficiencies and the judgment to collect data about the business, and give them pre-programmed sets of preferences that they can choose from when conditions 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 kind of ability. It just involves money rather than 300-pound men charging after you to do physical damage.

One thing that coaches can do that doesn't perform as well for business in project management perspectives, is cover up of purpose and strategy. In sports, substantial energy is spent on making a defensive or offensive package 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 stuff the run. If the offense is likely to throw the football, you drop into a zone coverage package, or you try to rush the passer with down linemen charging the quarterback; this puts a premium on the offense to mask the nature of the play as much as possible, and to get the offense team to delay on their strategy in response to your formation. Likewise, on the defensive part of the ball, it's worth to hide a blitz with zone coverage packages (or zone-blitz packages as they're called), so that the quarterback's last second play adjustments can be turned awry. While this sort of thing has some application in business, and it's a useful thought training (following Napoleon's mantra of 'Numerous times a day, I ask myself 'What would I do if the enemy appeared in an unforeseen spot?'), it doesn't work as well in business because the rules of engagement are more wide open.

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