Project Management in Logistics Starts With Managing Yourself

In this episode of Rozmowy Logistyków, Piotr Skobało and Adam Sobolewski discuss project management in logistics — and how it starts with managing yourself. They share good practices drawn from over 30 years of combined experience running projects.

WHAT'S OUT OF SCOPE MATTERS MORE THAN WHAT'S IN

Defining a project starts with establishing what it will NOT do — because IT systems invite a "wish-list concert": since we paid a million złoty, why doesn't the system also do this and that? A real example: two-thirds of the way through an inventory-planning system rollout, the sales director asked whether the system would also optimize order quantities against trade discounts — a feature that was never in scope. Better to swallow that frog at the start and write down a clear exclusion list than discover it midway through implementation.

DEDICATED TIME, NOT SQUEEZED IN AROUND CURRENT WORK

The classic project disease is assigning new tasks to people who are already working at 100% on current operations, and expecting them to deliver the project "on the side." Companies that successfully open new warehouses dedicate resources literally — they send an experienced "kickstarting team" from another location full-time onto the project. Even if full secondment isn't possible, it's worth calculating a real time budget (e.g. 10% of a given person's time) — because drawing constantly on the same resource without accounting for it in planning ends in burning out key people, even if the project "somehow" gets delivered in the short term.

TALK TO THE PEOPLE ON THE FLOOR, NOT JUST THEIR BOSSES

When rebuilding a fulfillment center into a returns processing center, the key stakeholder group turned out to be frontline warehouse workers and team leaders — people who remembered the chaos before the process was cleaned up and were afraid of sliding back into it. Three weeks of meetings with them, listening to their concerns and explaining the "why" before the project started, prevented mistakes invisible from the technical drawing (an example: a conveyor to the paper crusher disrupting cart flow in a spot the designer considered obvious). The rule "go and ask the person actually doing the work" (not their supervisor) is a foundation of Japanese management methodology (genchi genbutsu).

CONTINUOUSLY RE-VALIDATE THE BUSINESS CASE

PRINCE2 methodology teaches one rule worth remembering above all others: a project must be regularly checked (e.g. monthly at the steering committee) for whether its business case still makes sense — not just whether it's on schedule. A real example of a stopped project: an operations management system rollout halted halfway through, because the board decided that projects supporting sales and margin were more urgent. The opposite example: an e-commerce warehouse opened on the back of pandemic-era growth (tens of percent year over year) that stopped making financial sense once that peak subsided — the decision to open it was correct at the time it was made, but business conditions changed.

METHODOLOGY SHOULD SERVE THE PROJECT, NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND

Waterfall (sequential, cascading) works well for physical projects with hard stage dependencies (you can't install racking before the floor has cured), while Agile with sprints works better for IT projects and software development. A key warning: what matters is delivering the project on budget, on time, and within functional scope — not religiously sticking to one methodology for its own sake. Large, real projects can be run even from a shared spreadsheet with a task list updated once a week, if the team sticks to it consistently.

A PROJECT IS FIRST AND FOREMOST A FIGHT WITH YOURSELF

Before you can manage others, you have to be able to discipline yourself — managing your time, energy, and attention is the foundation of running any project effectively. A practical rule: react to a problem the moment it appears ("eat that frog"), and treat every setback as a chance to improve the process, not a failure to keep quiet about.