The best project management tool
A few years ago I had a coaching client with the following dilemma:
How can I keep everyone aligned without micromanaging them?
As the CEO, I want to know what's going on in the organisation. I need to know that we're moving towards our goals, and the right priorities have made their way down into people's work. It's not that I don't trust them - it's that communication is hard!
I don't want to keep asking for updates, or keep reminding people to do things, because that just frustrates everyone.
What can I do?
This founder was, without knowing it, in the position that I described last week. Their conversations with their managees were ending at the point they could productively be starting. They were having a lot of 'I'm doing this, and this, and this' conversations, which was using up people's time and patience, and stopping them from getting into the high-value discussions about advancing the organisation’s big strategic goals.
My advice to that client was to mandate the use of Project Pinboards1.
This is one of the simplest bits of organisational technology that you can deploy, but the effect - if you stick with it - can be very powerful.
What is a Project Pinboard?
It is a to do list
It is organised by project
It makes clear which projects are currently being worked on
It has a defined “next step” for each project2
It is kept up-to-date frequently
It is in a form that you can show to other people3
Here is an example made using Trello:
It might feel like micro-managing to tell everyone that they have to have a written to-do list. But this is a situation where you need to make some things fixed in order to create flexibility.
By insisting that people "visualise their work"4, you are avoiding the status update conversations that make people feel micro-managed.
You are also helping people to think about how to see their workload from the outside in, as well as the inside out - to step back and look at it with more strategic eyes. This paves the road towards a culture of co-ordinated self-management, which is one of the most effective ways we currently know of to deliver “knowledge work”. It simultaneously invites your more junior people to develop greater maturity, by providing this space for reflection and an opportunity to get to their hands on '“the way the work happens”.
On top of that you are encouraging a highly effective approach to project management that has a bias to action and a focus on outcomes more than outputs (more on that below).
I encourage you to give this a go! And if you think it would not work in your organisation, to reflect on why, and what you could do instead to achieve the same goals.
Some further tips on working with Project Pinboards
1. Use the most low-tech tool that you can
Trello is great. So is Microsoft To Do. They're both free. A spreadsheet would also be fine.
Keeping it low tech forces you to focus on the moon and not the finger - in other words, on the value of having it, and the conversations it enables. The more high-tech the solution, the more it tends to take over and become a complicated thing you have to service.
Whatever you do, do not get seduced by a flashy project management tool like Monday.com that would allow you to pull centralised reporting. Tools like this are distractions to stop real collaboration, and real management from happening. Centralised reporting is a way to avoid conversations rather than enable them.
2. Let people make it their own
Keep the ground rules minimal. Allow people to do it in their own way, as long as they do it. The basic structure is really the classic three-part list: "to do" "doing" and "done". But people might prefer something else. Demonstrate that this is about being fixed in service of being flexible by giving people some free rein.
3. It's worth learning to think in terms of projects and next-steps
A project is the ultimate outcome you are aiming for. A next step is something that you can concretely do, were you to have the time.
You cannot do a project, you can only do a next step. But next steps on their own are not valuable - it is the project outcome that we really want.
It is helpful thinking in these terms. We want to continually keep the end in mind, but we also want to bias to action. This approach5 encourages us to ask: "is there a step I could go ahead and take right now, however small, that moves me towards this goal?"
I first wrote about these on this blog back in 2023.
A next action can either be one that you are able to take, or one that you are waiting for someone else to take.
Although, as discussed in the next foot note, it is common to talk about “visualising” work, the key thing is to have something that can be reviewed by someone else to get a much faster overview than a verbal status update, because the written format forces people to be economical. I argue that this would be helpful even for team members who are visually impaired and using a screen reader. I welcome feedback from anyone who is doing this on how the overall approach can be adapted for this use case.
Although I talk about Project Pinboards, and suggest some specific ground rules, the underlying principle here is “visualise work”. This is one of the core patterns of Sociocracy, for instance, and is widely discussed in Lean / Agile circles. Project Pinboards are just one way of doing this that I like, because they are simple. Many other options are available!
This is the core of the project management approach in Getting Things Done by David Allen. Some people hate it. I found it life-changing.