Category : Project Management

What do you mean by “Project Management?”

Posted by Deborah at 6:00 pm

My last post was an observation on the absence of “teams” in popular definitions of project management.  But it’s not just that the term itself is missing essential elements.  I’m beginning to believe that “project management” is a term as broad as “general population.”

Here’s what I mean.  Drinking coffee the other day, I ran into a lively retired salesman named Mark, who owns a bulldog appropriately named Churchill.  Mark and I struck up a conversation on entrepreneurship, and I mentioned I was working with my husband on launching a new product called Fellowstream.  I said it was “an online project management tool.”

Mark got this funny look on his face.  Digging deeper and explaining that Fellowstream was “individual to-do lists meets Facebook groups,”  he snapped his fingers.  “Ah now I get it!” he exclaimed.  “I thought you were talking about constructions projects.”

Later that day, my sister Jennifer called me up to ask how work on Fellowstream was going.  Up until that point, she had only heard that Jacob had quit his day job to build an online project management tool.  When I started to explain that we were creating a software tool that allowed people to not only to manage their daily tasks, but also have a top-level view of how any project or team was progressing, she immediately got it.  “I could use that to manage the hygienists at Northwest Children’s Dentistry,” she said, referring to her own small business.

I thought that everyone defined “project management” as “working in teams to get stuff done.”  Obviously, that’s not the case.  Ask 100 people what project management is, you’re likely to get 100 different responses, all correct in their own way, but not 100% compatible.

This leaves me with the challenge: what words do resonate for Fellowstream.  Maybe “team management” is a better term?  “Collaboration management?”  Or maybe it’s the word “management” that everyone’s getting hung up on.

Back to the wordsmithing board!

-Deborah Fike

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Projects and Knowledge Management

Posted by Deborah at 10:26 pm

While outlining Fellowstream’s “min spec” (i.e. the most barebones version of Fellowstream we were willing to create for launch), we asked a lot of people who have worked on teams what they want most in a project management tool.  Features like calendars showed up, which fit our expectations, but almost just as often, people asked for wikis.

Wikis might not seem like an integral feature of a project management tool.  In fact, most online tools treat wikis as a completely separate space aside from project management.  The logic goes -Project managers are the heart of the project.  Their job is to set the min spec, dole out tasks, and wait for the work to get done.

Anything wrong with this picture?

As much as we covet phrases like “busy as a bee,” projects are not generally executed by mindless drones.  These people aren’t just getting their tasks done, they’re thinking about what they’re doing.  They have ideas about how to make their job easier as well as how to drive forward the team’s strategy.  They brainstorm and improve processes.  They teach each other, and mentor the new additions to the team.

On the flip side, projects are not generally led by ruthless leaders on a pedestal.  The product designers, charity run organizers, software developers, and student body presidents we know are managing people to get work done.  They not only gather knowledge from the team to motivate and give them a sense of ownership of the project, but they also want the best idea to rise to the top.  And as egotistical as we can all be sometimes, there are very few of us that can think of all possible outcomes every single time we are presented with a problem.

Projects aren’t just a series of tasks…it’s a series of decisions to execute tasks, based on the collective knowledge of the team.  This knowledge, if it resides only in the minds of the individual, will not get transferred, and the project will suffer because of it.

And that’s why Fellowstream is going to have project specific wikis.

As mentioned, though, this is just our “min spec” stab at Fellowstream.  There are as many knowledge management tools out there as there are project managers, so we’re interested in learning about new tools.  Feel free to comment on any you enjoy or send me a line at deborah AT avalonlabs DOT net.

I’m looking for a few goods ideas, as much as the next project manager.

-Deborah Fike

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