What is Project Management?

Learn about Project management with Sholay!
Sholay

Introduction

This is one of the most popular scenes from a cult movie called Sholay. You might wonder what this scene can teach us about management? but if you look closely, it has many hidden terms for Project and human resource management.

What is Project Management?

A project can be for a short or a long duration that is undertaken to achieve the desired result or an outcome. Project management is the application of intelligence, expertise, skill-sets, and experience. For any project to succeed in an organization, resources must be allocated in a way that defines the success of the project.

Case Breakdown: Movie Sholay

In this case, Gabbar Singh, the project lead allocated the project task to 3 people in his team. The task was to kill or kidnap 2 people. This wasn’t executed successfully as they failed to complete the task. A failed Project is something he can’t wrap his head around. He allocated 3 resources that he considered had a good skill-set and were experienced in killing people. In an organization, you won’t be given such jobs, (illegal) to complete. You would be given other legal jobs.

Gabbar Singh is one of the most experienced criminals in town and has a reputation to maintain as he is one of the ‘Most Wanted Criminal’ with a reward of Rs.50,000 on his head. He took pride in the fact that he is ‘most wanted’ by the police, while his team clearly isn’t helping him to maintain his reputation.

In an organization, a leader would want to maintain his reputation and he would look into the concerns of his employees and would provide them with all the resources to execute the task efficiently.

What is Probability?

Gabbar Singh also touches upon a very important mathematical concept of ‘Probability‘. Probability means that something is likely to occur or not. It is evident in the scene when he mentions there are 3 people to kill with 6 bullets. According to Gabbar, the Success rate of dying or living is unfair, so he fires 3 shots in the air and then plays the probability game while saying the famous dialogue “Tera Kya Hoga Kalia”????

The probability of success indicator talks about what is the likelihood for a project to succeed. This indicator is generally used at the beginning of the project which helps locate the warning signs of whether the project will fail or succeed. In this particular scene, Gabbar Singh concludes that the project has failed and is very annoyed with his staff. He decides to fire (Read ‘Kill’) his 3 employees who couldn’t achieve the desired outcome of the task allotted.

Gabbar Singh also displays the sadistic characteristics of a boss by taking pleasure in the suffering of his staff.

He decides to kill his employees by pointing the gun at their heads & saying ‘3 aadmi aur 6 Gooliyan, Badi nainsaafi hain’. (3 Men and 6 bullets, that’s really unfair!)

PS: Not all bosses are sadistic. It is used for Understanding Purposes.

 

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