How photography helped me with project management
This year, I am tasked with coordinating three (now-remote) teams of software engineers, designers, reporters, plus a multitasking CEO, to create a weekly newsletter for every neighborhood in the City of Los Angeles.
With support from the Google News Initiative Innovation Challenge, we at Crosstown are building a product that will create 110 different newsletters each week and send them to Angelenos in neighborhoods spread across nearly 500 square miles.
Each person on our team works part-time, including me! Our team members have schedules that do not overlap. Most are students with other pressing commitments — midterms, projects, theses and exams. My challenge is to keep everyone connected and focused on the right priorities. When I started this project management role at the beginning of the year, I thought if I could just get the whole team to use one organizational platform, I could overcome our challenges. I just assumed There’s An App For That.™
As a journalist and photographer, I soon realized that many of the lessons I had learned in other parts of my career directly applied to my new role.
- The best camera is the one in your pocket. (Translation: The best software is the one your team is already using.)
Back in February, after our university-based team returned from winter break, I put together a massive Google doc outlining every task — gargantuan and minute — we had to complete in order to meet our goal of producing 110 distinct email newsletters every week. (Yes, I realize such a list is clearly more in line with the waterfall model vs. agile project management.)
I grouped All The Tasks by product and team: Editorial, Newsletter Project, Website Redesign and Existing Products, Rebrand and Unanswered Questions. My plan was to commit these tasks to paper and have each team sign off on their parts. Then, I would import them into The Best Software in the World, and the actual product buildout would be cake.
As I loaded the list into one management tool after another, I wondered how long it would take me to onboard each member. I wondered if anyone would actually look at or read the updates that the programs would inevitably send out daily, weekly and monthly. I wondered if our existing systems would suffer at the hands of the shiny new one.
I checked out some beauties: Monday, Asana, Roadmunk, ClickUp, Gantt-Chart. I also looked at Smartsheet and Jira, and solicited opinions from several professional project managers. Each had their own system and own preference, of course. In fact, one of my friends who had managed a project for an international car company had used Smartsheet, but confessed that she mostly managed the project by email because that’s what the client responded to and preferred.
And yet, I kept thinking I would have a better handle on our neighborhood newsletter project if I could just find the perfect software. It reminded me of thoughts I had had about cameras: That I would produce better work if I had a mirrorless camera or a sharper lens. And then, when the lens mount on my DSLR cracked last year while visiting relatives, and I was forced to continue my 365 day personal photography project with just my phone, I was reminded of one of the first lessons I learned in photography: The best camera is the one in your pocket.
At Crosstown, I looked at our existing systems. Our editorial and design teams were already moving their stories and tasks along in the workspace, Notion.
Our software engineers had been using Pivotal Tracker for over a year, and ran a tight ship. (Pivotal Tracker helps them track tasks according to priority and time spent, and makes it easy to monitor performance.)
And everyone planned, chatted and scheduled meetings on Slack (and now, of course, Zoom).
At first glance, managing multiple platforms felt like barely controlled chaos. But actually, there was a method to the madness. … I had all the tools I needed right in front of me: the tools my people were already using.
2. Five shots
After the rule of thirds, one of the first lessons I learned as a documentary photographer was making sure to take five different shots to tell a story: wide angle, medium shot, close-up, over the shoulder and something unusual or surprising. Basically, macro, micro and everything in between.
As with documenting an event to tell a complete story from start to finish, I try to be thorough with communication (perhaps too thorough, according to some of my colleagues).
Here’s how we piece it together with our different tools.
Micro:
- We have a daily-check-in channel on Slack where each person writes their priorities at their work shift’s beginning and their accomplishments at their shift’s end.
- Daily standup meetings to talk about priorities and what each person may need from another team.
- Each of our three teams — editorial, design and software engineering — continue to use their own boards in Notion and Pivotal Tracker to track their daily tasks.
- Daily priorities list for CEO.
- Daily end of day report for CEO on my accomplishments.
Medium:
- I use Notion to map out weekly priorities, which I send to the whole team.
- I also use Notion to capture weekly recaps — what we accomplished vs. what we set out to do — which I also send out to the whole team.
- Separate weekly Zoom meetings with design, editorial and engineering teams.
- We use many (many, many) different channels on Slack to organize ourselves and communicate, such as #intelligence for user testing, #air-quality for subject matter research and #xtown-media-hits when another publication cites or republishes our work.
Macro:
- In Notion, I use the calendar and Gantt chart view for the overview of our neighborhood newsletter project, organized by product, team and date.
- We have retros every 4- 6 weeks where we bring up the bad, the good and questions. And we try to incorporate changes into our system.
- This summer, we’ll try out time-boxed sprints on certain new projects, such as building the template editors will use to create the newsletter each week.
3. To be a photographer, shoot.
Just like with photography — or piano playing or running or doing a 1,000 piece puzzle while on lockdown — project management requires showing up. You can read books and blogs and interview colleagues on their systems (which I have done), but that only prepares you somewhat for when a coworker has a breakdown from being up all night with a sick parent or when your users tell you that your designs are boring or when your custom-made database shuts down just when your reporters are on deadline.
Prepare as much as you can in advance, including preparing to make it up when you get to work.
It’s not the camera. It’s not the software.
It’s about putting systems in place, scrapping them when necessary, checking in each morning and showing up for the daily calls … even if you’re the only one there.
This is the third post in our journey toward creating 110 email newsletters, one for each neighborhood in the City of Los Angeles. Read our project overview here. And stay tuned for more posts on our people, processes and project.
