Scott Berkun

Everything is a project, even this

As often happens in life, when I meet people at a party or some work thing and they ask what I do, I tell them I write books. They ask what kind of books, and when I mention I wrote a book about project management they get all condescending. Why would you write a book about something as boring as project management? They ask.

To which, I often say.  Everything is a project.

And they say, what?

And I say, again, Everything is a project.

How did you get to this party? I ask. Well, that’s a project. How did you plan and deliver the last party you threw for others? That was a project too. The making of your home, the delivery of electricity and water to it, and the earning of wages to pay for all these things are all various forms of projects, or consist of activities roughly comparable to any definition of a project.

Then I say the kicker, project management is only as boring as the thing being managed.

On a good day, they they look at me for a long moment, frozen in that curiously goofy look of actually thinking that all of us make now and then, and then they say “Huh”. And then I ask them what they do, successfully completing the project of changing the conversation with a stranger at a party.

On a bad day, they conclude I am even more boring than they thought, and despite their full Martini in hand, excuse themselves to the bar to get a drink.

I wrote awhile ago about why project managers get no respect, and that’s because people who make a big deal out of the project-manageryness of their work, as opposed to the domain of the things they make (homes, software, films, cookies) come off as a kind of weenie, a pm-weenie if you will. They appear to be people who are more interested in schedules, budgets and methods than the results those tools help achieve, which is kind of weird.  It’s like the director of a bad movie who talks only about his fancy zoom lenses,  or that the film came in under-budget. They miss the point.

But the best project managers, including those people who do lead or manage things yet never use the pm title, somehow know instinctively that everything is a project. They know there needs to be a driving force of thinking, a constant source of social energy, a list or a table or a spreadsheet, that makes it easier for everyone to push their own small decisions forward, increasing the odds with every single effort that the results will be good. Good project managers aren’t even necessarily very organized, they know many ways to drive people forward and hold them to commitments, even without a GTD brain implant.

There are many ways to look at all that we do, but the project-centric view is quite potent. Everything in work, and many things in life, have a a goal, a set of constraints, some design challenges, a schedule, a few dependencies, some key relationships, etc.  And it’s hard  to be good at managing, leading, teaching, creating, making or building just about anything if you have absolutely zero skills at project management. To me, anyone who is a writer, a VP, a salesman, a film-maker, a teacher or an athlete does project management of a sort nearly all the time.

When I get stuck, at work or in personal life matters, or I see someone else who is blocked, I say, out loud, everything is a project. If I’m blocked, what are my goals? What are my assets? What are my liabilities? How can I divide this big thing I’m stuck on into smaller pieces, one of which I might be able to tackle? And sometimes just realizing there is a simple easy way to reframe anything into the form of a project is enough to get things moving again.

How to keep meetings short: 5 tricks

In the never ending pile of meeting tips, here are 5 five more:

• Making the meeting rooms 5 degrees colder than everywhere else. First it keeps people awake, second it gives them a biological reason to want to resolve issues and get out of the room quickly.
• Remove the chairs from the room. This is an old one, popularized by SCRUM for their standing meeting idea. If people have to stand they are less prone to rambling, to distraction, and have the sense they are on the way to something else, all good qualities for most status type meetings to have. I’ve always loved the 3 question model SCRUM advocates. Instead of resume length status reports, it’s boom boom boom, next. Love it.
• Have uncomfortable chairs. Just saw this on kottke.org. These are chairs designed to be uncomfortable or difficult to sit in at all, so people don’t want to stay long. The talking head chair is my favorite.
• Pick the right person to run the meeting. Some people are good at being meeting gestapos, and some are pansies. Don’t let a pansy run a meeting, even if the pansy is you. Someone has to put up an agenda, cut people off who ramble too far off the agenda for bad reasons, and keep the show on time so it ends early enough that everyone won’t be late for the next meeting.
• Split announcements from discussions. A meeting between 4 people where they are developing ideas, exploring alternatives and going deep is one thing. That’s a discussion. An entirely other thing are meetings centered on status reports, announcements, and other boring low priority stuff. Make the difference clear. If you’re doing the former, it should be a small group, and the meeting can go as long as it needs to. If it’s the later, it should be a bigger group, and it should be as short as possible (any discussions that last longer than 60 seconds in a status meeting should be tabled to a separate meeting of only the 4 people who actually care). If your team respects your ability to distinguish between these things, they will respect your meetings by showing up, in response to the respect you show them by not wasting their time.

See also:

• the popular post how to start meetings on time (The honest version)
• Chapter 10 in my book Making things happen, is titled How not to annoy people, and it’s all about how to run different kinds of meeting in the right way.