You don't have a project management problem (you have this instead)

…and why it’s such a squishy area

A vast majority of professionals think they have a problem these days -- “project management.” Problem is, that’s not your problem. Well, it is, but not the way you usually think it is. Let me be a little vaguer...

I was often asked by line managers and training people whether I had a good “project management” seminar for their people. My first response is, “what exactly do you mean by ‘project management’?” Very few have an immediately good answer. They’ve often just heard it as a need from their reports or their constituents. “Do you have people who need to know how to lay out a GANTT chart or detailed critical path for complex projects like constructing a building or implementing a new corporate information system? Or do you have people who feel overwhelmed with the sheer load of things to do, many of which can’t be finished in a single action step?” Usually, it’s some combination of the two, but mostly it’s the latter.

I call anything a “project” that’s unlikely to be finished in one action step or one sitting. A trip coming up? That’s a project: Finalize conference trip. Need clarification on your new job responsibilities? That’s a project: Clarify new job description with boss. Need to investigate developers for your website? That’s a project: Research web developers. Need to buy a birthday present for your partner? That’s a project: Celebrate partner’s birthday. My experience with thousands of people over the years indicates that most have 20-50 of these kinds of “projects” at any one time.

Problem #1 - I’ve never seen any two of those projects that needed the same amount of planning or detailing of steps to get them under control. It ranges from three bullet points on the back of an envelope in a coffee shop (usually your most productive thinking) to days of intensive planning with a dozen people, pages of outlined steps, critical path, the works. So, most single "project management" model will either under- or over-plan most of your projects. There's no one-size-fits-all.

Problem #2 - How do we integrate “horizontal” vs. “vertical” control?

“Vertical” thinking means: how do I detail out a single project, theme, or topic? If that’s all we ever had to think about, any decent model for thinking through steps would do the job. In Getting Things Done, I laid out a Natural Planning Model – what questions to answer, and in what order, to make things happen most efficiently. The purpose of the project, a vision of the successful outcome, sufficient brainstorming to identify key relevant details, organizing that thinking into priorities, sequences and/or components; and next actions on all the moving parts.

“Horizontal” thinking, however, means looking at all the hundreds of moving parts across dozens of things you need to keep tabs on during any given 24-hour period. It often requires that you be extremely flexible in recalibrating when to do what actions on multiple things you have going at one time. The Horizontal usually blows the hell out of the Vertical!

The only way to really hold all of this together is a holographic approach. You need to be able to think rapidly through a project, problem, or topic as required (vertical, natural planning) – capture the results of that thinking and plug them into the whole mix of action reminders and reference information you might need – and then scan the complete horizon regularly enough to trust your intuition about what needs to happen and when.

That’s the real challenge. It’s possible to get there, but it’s not a simple task. You need to think and capture as much as you need to do – get it all out of your head, plug it into a system you trust, and then move confidently through whatever the day throws at you. Get that right, and the fog clears.

The middle of every successful project looks like a disaster. - Rosabeth Moss Kanter