A martini glass and a crayon.
What does a good project management workflow and software suite look like?
Project Managers start their journey having crayons in their toolbox and looking for workflows and programs that educate them in the ‘ways of project management’ and ‘best practices’. There is something to the idea of feeling more qualified or legitimate when we know what these practices are. We pick up PMI and Agile certifications along the way and can show off all the magical templates that we built to run the most complex projects we’ve seen. We expect that when we have reached the “top” that there will be the holy grail of templates and secret practices that take on the world. Instead, we find a martini glass and a crayon. We return to the beginning and find that the best tools are ‘no tools’ and the best workflow is ‘no workflow’. Conversations with software development teams may involve fancy tools and templates while critical strategic conversations with VP/GMs and EPMO restructuring directors involve crayons and a martini glass.
There are plenty of posts online that will push methodologies, best practices, tool suites and create massive comparisons and ratings for each of them. Novel ideas in the project management world are quite limited. The best solutions are straight-forwards and intuitive.
Is this project stable? Is it supposed to be? what can we do to get the balance right? what can we let go of?
Think more art, and less process.
If your project is getting “out of hand” (you’ll know), consider how you might guide a child. There is a reasonable balance somewhere between discipline, encouragement, exploration, curiosity, engagement, support, etc. Projects are analogues to this idea. The team of people (even if it is a team of 1) are bringing something to life and raising it. What does this child need right now? Are there questions here that need asking? What are we missing? Are there other ways to go about this?
More rigor and acts of discipline are not always the answer. Suffocating a project with processes can kill it. Letting a project go with no guidance or protection can also kill it. Find the balance.
Where are the risks?
Understand and try to predict where the project might trip and fall. Are those risks reasonably distributed? Will the project be able to take all of the necessary steps in the entire journey and succeed? How do we know? Has this path been walked before? Is any of it known? What happens if things don’t go well?
You need to get the balance right here as well. You should not go on a long hike with an infinite number of items for every potential eventuality. Your pack would be too heavy. You should not go on a hike with nothing (naïvely) because you may run into a problem along the way. This is not to say that there aren’t those who will choose either of these extremes and still succeed. Try the “not extreme” and more balanced solution first. Adjust later.
Where to start?
If you have never managed a project before, overprepare a little bit. Read and learn what you can. Everything you could ever want to find is on the internet. Find someone who has done it before and ask questions. Find out what’s important, what might break, who might care, what options you might have, what they already know or do today, learn and master their approach first before you try to touch or change anything.
Objects may be smaller than they appear.
If you’re starting from scratch, find out what parts actually need to be truly “from scratch”, otherwise consider how much margin you might be willing to sacrifice to adopt someone else’s solution or buy something off the shelf. Find out what someone might be afraid of, usually fear makes problems appear larger than they are.
Start small. Try something. See how it goes. Put a band-aid on it. Try again.
When in doubt: crayon and martini glass.
