Introduction
Being a project manager means I’m responsible for how we do things rather than what we’re doing. Kind of like an air traffic controller: I didn’t create the flight schedule or design the airport, but I am in charge of making sure each plane is in the right place, taking off in a particular order, and identifying any problems from my unique bird’s eye view. It’s a tacky metaphor but I’ve yet to find another I like more (leave a comment with your suggestions).
I’m writing today to share some unique project management practices we have at VICE, but it’s not quite right to just dive in, is it? Project management is an often misunderstood or ambiguous business function. It is a humanist practice and therefore doesn’t fit into the emotionally flat and static business paradigms our society relies on. So before we dive into specifics about project management, let’s first go to the top level and look at the modern corporate landscape which makes effective project management so tricky.
Humans and Work
As things change around us, our businesses and culture receive the imprint of those changes and react accordingly. Like a ship changing course for the weather, it takes a while for the entire system to turn in the new direction. This delay is particularly visible with corporate technology. Industrialization in the 20th century led to operational standards that are too bureaucratic, overly impersonal, and have no built-in method for optimizing the way a company works. Those paradigms are also marred by the white capitalist psyche which created them, having made it feel standard or even encouraged for a small group of men to control the business from behind closed doors. These factors make earnest collaboration impossible at scale. It’s a less-than-ideal foundation for tech-oriented business leaders and employees. They’re accustomed to rapid change, favor progressive thinking, and expect to be heard. Those at pre-Internet companies feel powerless to advise their leaders, and entrepreneurs have no time-tested practices to guide them.
So while these points are high level concepts, they’re a needed backdrop for any conversation about how people get things done. Any project manager worth their weight in salt should be aware of how these unspoken elements set the stage for their day to day work.
How can it make me a better project manager?
Project management requires a lot of earnest, interpersonal interaction, yet relying on, or even discussing, related best practices as a central part of business makes “the suits” break out in hives. This, to me, is toxic and counterintuitive. How much cash have American businesses wasted on the mistake of forgetting their results depend on the humans they employ? How do you expect a group of people to accomplish anything if they aren’t collaborating in a vein of respect and trust? All of the above creates an environment where it’s pretty difficult to feel you are truly succeeding, and ensuring success is a project manager’s central mission.
It’s not too complicated if you take it at face value: We’re there to help everyone get shit done on time without losing their sanity. I’m not saying project managers are going to rescue corporate America, but our job is an opportunity to create a healthier ecosystem for workers. With a humanist mindset as the basis for your practice, you can improve any team. And again, this dynamic is prerequisite to any type of sustainable success, anyway. Anyone who’s actions indicate otherwise is probably leaning on the mistakes of their predecessors as an excuse. It’s easier to be self interested than bring about positive change.
Humanist Project Management
Project management is rife with certifications, guidelines, decks, methodologies, and many other resources one can use to improve their work. However, these things do not a project manager make. There’s a reliance on these flat resources which is an echo of the type of management we’ve become familiar with in this blog post so far. It’s important to first believe in yourself as a manager who is equipped to help a team or teams succeed, not because of an Agile Black Belt bootcamp (*groan*) you took last year, but because your experience, diverse skill set, and natural predispositions make you an ideal facilitator.
Another pillar to rely on is a real expectation for collaboration. Truly putting heads together to create and execute a project over time has endless benefits, most falling under one of the below.
- Healthy for the human. Humanist principles respect the worker and create a sustainable environment, which makes them happy and reduces employee churn.
- Acts as a safety net for morale and work ethic. It’s obvious when someone isn’t pulling their weight when the bright light of team cohesion is a daily occurrence.
- Boosts productivity and ensures success because each person’s work is heard, respected, and transparent given the group’s shared goal.
- Cultivates creativity and leadership: Once someone trusts their team and knows they have a space to flex their abilities, and this is happening at scale, the business’s source pool for innovation and problem solving is exponentially increased. Think of it as “trickle up innovation”. Leaders: Reward and you shall be rewarded.
This is the ideal workplace that so many strive for but miss the woods for the trees. So if nothing else, a great place to start with project management is centering your work around effective collaboration.
The Day-to-Day
Consider your portfolio as a whole. What are your responsible for at work? Enumerate and rank your projects, remembering that ongoing or administrative items are also projects.
Next, consider the individuals you’re working with throughout these items. What obvious operational problems are slowing them down? If you’re entering a pre-existing team, trust your fresh perspective to create lightweight solutions for complex issues, and motivate your team to resolve old blockers. Don’t railroad your colleagues with information: focus your first steps on finding allies for each issue who can own the solution projects, and manage outward communication cross-functionally and with leadership. Now you have the building blocks for execution.
As you can see, everything starts with the team. It’s all customized for them. Use the principles of Agile, or whatever you subscribe to, to benefit the group. And when it’s not beneficial, a key piece of a project manager’s job is to design a custom course of action.
For example, project and sprint planning meets are truly hard to pull off if you run the session from a template. People will struggle to focus and inevitably care less, which is not the tone you want to set. I like to pull together a thorough agenda and send it around before those sessions. It solves any key misunderstandings offline before everyone is together, gives finicky staffers an idea of what’s expected, and allows any space cadets to get their items together last minute.
Another example is this: Agile typically implies a sprint of 2 weeks, or 10 working days. However, we have one engineering team that’s just five people and most are remote. Given they don’t passively communicate as much, we do five day sprints so that we’re intrinsically checking in more, and breaking projects down into even smaller pieces.
These types of preferences should be many in number and form your custom playbook. A set of written principles from elsewhere is very important but doesn’t come close to guaranteeing repeatable success. If you’re not sure where to start, dive in with a basic suite of processes and fix issues as you’re confronted with them. As you come across those moments, you’ll find the fix is often reusable. Document them as your artifacts and spend time teaching them to everyone.
If you’re truly just getting started, our favorite methodology is Agile (that’s a Harvard Biz Review article from last summer), and more specifically the Scrum technique (PDF from its inventors, updated 2018).
Conclusion
The initial few months of establishing a customized structure and its flex points acts as a gateway to entry. Things get easier as you go. Overcoming obstacles and succeeding isn’t as daunting once the space between your team and the finish line is no longer a wide, confusing gulf. You’ve taught your peers how to proceed strategically, so they do. They’ll autonomously pass the baton between themselves according to your ethos, getting more and more familiar with the turns, increasing their general velocity. Simply put, it’s easier for a team to move and pivot once they’ve taken a few sharp corners together. You become less visible as your processes become the unnoticed river down which your crew floats. This allows you to step back and tackle even deeper issues, thus growing your professional skills.
But again, none of this group chemistry and its sweet success can happen if we aren’t first working together as humans with a shared goal.
For those entering a team, be you a project manager or otherwise: be confident when faced with archaic modes of thinking. More often than not, your peers will be open-minded given that you’ve put in proper effort to explain.
For those starting a team, solo creatives, and anyone else: Having a process structure that works for you is a key first step. Customize everything until you can repeat it successfully. Then rely on it.
