Dashed Utopia Pt3 of 3
If it wasn’t clear, I am very proud of the work we did and all that we accomplished. My experience need not be unique, however. Even before my time with this particular startup, I had worked in various departments where we had worked to greatly improve processes, lightening burdens while increasing the quality of releases and reducing development time.
In the next company I worked for, a well-known semi-conductor manufacturer, I replicated much of what I had done at the startup; I had a staff of three committed just to creating the systemic and we supported a varied team of over 200 people, mostly software developers, but including a lot of UX designers, hardware engineers, project managers, and scientists.
The results of our efforts made for a smoother running, more well informed and decidedly more productive department, though in a larger company, there were a lot of external factors that caused more hiccups than I cared to deal with. The nice thing is the worst that happened in my year and a half as operations managers were just the hiccups; we had no major process fires to put out.
I sincerely believe any company can do it, large or small (with large companies adding complexity, of course) It takes considerably teamwork, a real commitment, and continuous planning.
It also takes a significant shift in the mental model I think most companies adopt when it comes to managing even the simplest of projects.
The completion of this startup refactoring project soundly demonstrated to me that several unconventional (at least as far as project management was concerned) ideas I had been considering could be implemented in concert and actually generate positive results.
The most unconventional concept I implemented was probably the most simple. No weekend work, no long hours. It’s amazing how much more productive my staff seemed to be when the burdens of work were fully lifted from their shoulders on the weekends and they could concentrate on their personal lives completely over the weekend — and in the evenings as well.
The next unconventional ideas were heavily influenced by my experiences from an earlier part of my career when I was working on a team to develop a complex manufacturing product lifecycle program. These ideas form the heart of this book and I indirectly reflected on them at the very start when I said:
I rarely needed to check my email, except for handling various external requests, only had meetings on rare occasions, and my team only used spreadsheets for the occasional quick analysis.
The change in mindset is around those three items I specifically referred to: email, spreadsheets, and meetings which is at the core of my philosophy of how to improve productivity within an organization.
Most companies use tools far beyond those three, of course, using tools that match the needs of their respective industries. Companies will also add broad scope services and systems like project management tools, version control, and file sharing, and may go so far as to include digital governance, maybe even dabbling in information architecture and knowledge management. Yet despite all of the other software and services, it’s been my observation that the core platform of many companies’ processes are some combination of emails, spreadsheets, and meetings — especially emails and meetings.
These three tools are so imbedded in the corporate culture zeitgeist, the company may not even recognize the influence they have and, it can be a challenge for businesses to overcome the momentum developed of using them as the core of their process systems.
And it’s not just the specific elements of this trifecta that is the problem; it’s the mindset around it that is the actual problem. It’s a mindset that creates overly-complicated systems around these most simple of tools; systems that are convoluted and hard to manage, decreasing actual productivity and increasing the likelihood of project collapse.
The familiarity of email, spreadsheets, and meetings has the potential of limiting options with regards to creating a comprehensive, adaptable, and unencumbered project process management system. In a way, organizations can sabotage their processes and productivity by their reliance on tools that, while familiar to the point of ubiquity, actually cause more problems than they are perceived to fix.
This is the final part of this story, but not the end of “the book”. More details (as they become available) here: https://kecskes.net/projectshare.
This story is part of a book I attempted to write in regards to my experiences in project operations and software development. Instead of just sitting on the 41K words I’ve written (not including the probably 100K words of just brainstorming), I thought I’d share fragments instead. #projectshare.
Part 1 of this particular story is here: https://medium.com/@adam.kecskes/a-dashed-utopia-of-project-operations-3581ec60b4bc and part 2 is here: https://medium.com/@adam.kecskes/dashed-utopia-pt2-4c7e25a3be85
