Be the Brakes

“Don’t be obsessed with your desires, Danny. The Zen philosopher, Basho, once wrote, ‘A flute with no holes, is not a flute. A donut with no hole, is a Danish.‘“

How to Keep a Project on Track

Effective, fast-moving project management for small teams

12 Simple Reasons Project Management is Important

I’m here to keep this project on track…

I’ve gone on record lamenting some of the staleness I see in the discipline of project management. Gantt charts are the enemy. Spreadsheets stink. Scopes of work never say what you thought they did.

The advancements that have been made in project management relate more to where we do our work (Monday, asana, etc.) than how we do it. Yet, the tensions with the practice don’t seem to yield? Why would we keep doing the same thing over and over again when it produces such unreliable results?

I’m reading a (really stellar) book that unpacks scientists tricks to help us all make better decisions in our every day lives. In a chapter titled, Making Things Happen, the author is walking us through how scientists differentiate between correlation and causation.

This is the signature sin of so many tough projects, we reverse engineer issues and are so certain of their causes, we don’t stop to consider we may just be getting it all wrong. The author aptly says this:

…suddenly it seemed evident that we have a simple way of thinking about causation: it’s a matter merely of the correlations we observe when we intervene in a system.

The whole notion that the project manager is the one who keeps the project moving and on track might be more about us than it is about the project. What if we, the timeline we built or the process we made isn’t the cause at all, but one of many potential correlations?

This next quarter I’m focusing less on how to craft more processes, and spending more time creating and observing interventions to improve those systems. A la…experiment.

That’s exactly what intervening is in the scientific community, it’s creating a series of interventions to specific variables and seeing what happens. So how can we apply this practically?

1. What if instead of focusing so much on milestones we focused on evaluations of our initial estimates leading into those milestones?
2. How smoothly would the project go if we released control and let the people doing the work do just that instead of checking in with us so often?
3. Who might be better than you to check-in on the status of a project that may provide some collaborative input?

At your next project close, instead of identifying how you could have guessed better at the beginning, take a crack at a new practice of project management and experiment a bit as you go along. In essence, worry less about being the one who keeps it all going, and worry more about what are only the most critical points to step in and be the brakes.