scott.hodson.blog

I remember when I used to toil for hours creating MS Project plans for certain projects. These helped justify dates and cost estimates to the higher-ups. Then, mid-stream I would try to keep the task percent-complete numbers up to date and balance the availability of development resources, but sometimes it’s hard to know how far you are on a task while you’re still discovering unknown aspects of a software project. I would sometimes even decrease the percent complete of tasks because more unknowns were uncovered. Of course, to management unaware of the software development process, this seemed hard to believe so as to not let my credibility with them suffer I would just tick up the percentage completes by tiny amounts until some real progress was made. This is akin to stock analysts rating a stock “Underperform” which everybody knows means “SELL!” because the analyst doesn’t want to upset the company by actually recommending a sell-rating of a company that he’s covering, but I digress…

But the thing that bugs me most about systems like these are the emails that I would still get that such project management tools are supposed to prevent: “Where are we?” or “What still needs to be done?” or “What tasks do we still need to complete?” or “When will we be ready?” Even with newer, online tools I get the same problem. One company I work with imposes on me to keep my tasks up to date in their Basecamp account but just today I got a “What tasks need to be complete?” email from them. What use is it for me to do all of this electro-micro-management if nobody else reads it or follows it or tries to use it after I’ve dedicated so much time into trying to keep it up-to-date and accurate?

I think the illusion that tools are going to make our lives easier is only as powerful as the team’s commitment to using such tools for their intended purposes. If you don’t get buy-in from other stakeholders to the tool and it’s meaning to the team then the tool won’t do any good for you. If you can’t get any group buy-in then just use a GTD Tiddly Wiki for yourself. However, the people usually imposing upon you to justify and manage your project with Gantt charts do so just to give them a comfortable feeling that the project has been thoughtfully planned, but they don’t want to refer to the project chart to see where the project is, it’s easier for them to interrupt you while you’re editing your Gantt chart.