Meeting agreed upon deadlines, especially when stakeholders end up needing earlier end dates, will make you feel like a Magician, hence the “Milestone or Mirage?” words in the title of this chapter. Here’s how you can work your magic.
Here is my takeaway #24 from one of the most useful practical books in my field, “Project Management for the Unofficial Project Manager”:
24) “Work is the time needed to accomplish a task…Duration is the time needed to get the work done, accounting for everything else that needs to get done as well–real life.
If stakeholders tighten any of your constraints, you will want to negotiate. Using duration of activities instead of work for your time negotiation will provide you with some leverage for reaching a “win-win” with the stakeholders.”
Note: This comes from Chapter 4 “Planning the Project: Milestone or Mirage?” (page 90)
If you scheduled wisely rather than committing to heroic time frames without any duration, you will have left enough “flex” or “float” to negotiate “tighter” end dates if needed. Things change right in the middle of your business work and projects. But if you are prepared and you have laid out a risk mitigation plan properly, you will be ready for this challenge. Turn it into an opportunity!
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STORY TIME:
I liked the approach of an “unofficial” program manager I worked with. He was actually a department manager, but over a very diverse department with a few different teams (At times “unofficial” project managers and project teams). We used Jira and a very “unconventional” approach to Agile. But it worked for us in a lot of ways, because he (with the help of his mentor) engineered it as well as he could to fit our various types of work.
(Note: That company operates at levels 4 and 5 on my (Storyboard PM) business maturity chart. But it manages at levels 1 or 2 on my project management maturity chart. The functional work and project work definitely needs more separation and needs to treat projects differently for those to have a chance, but I won’t get into it much here on this post.).
We didn’t have a “daily standup” for separate project groups. We met for a 15-minute update meeting in the morning twice a week. Sometimes it felt like a standup meeting, and other times it felt like a status meeting, but it always felt like an accountability meeting. In other words, our main focus was: Are you getting what is expected of you, done on time? That worked fine as long as everyone was clear about what the expectations were and what “done” meant for a given project, work activity, or task.
I liked how our manager treated story points. Since we were not functioning as a Scrum Team with official positions (we had developers, but not scrum masters, or product owners) and following Scrum or Agile precepts to the letter of the law, we had more leeway to find what worked for us somewhere in the middle of what can be a vast chasm between Agile and Traditional Project Management. I wouldn’t say it was a Hybrid version though, because we were picking and choosing between different options to each, as we pleased, quite fluidly, and without much intention or certainty in understanding the ramifications.
At any rate, we applied 1 day of work (duration = 8 hours) to be equal to 1 story point (work = less than or equal to 6 hours), which naturally and simply accounted for both duration and work in our reporting. The reality is that all of us have administrative tasks, meetings, emails, and other things that come up that prevent time blocking any focus on one project for more than a 6-hour block on any given day (and 6 hours is pushing it). I could work with that, and it mostly worked well for me with my obligations.
Preferably, we aren’t sprinting all of the time; however, rushing in on too much of the same work for too long of stints. Our employers can help break it up by properly distinguishing between functional and project work. Our co-workers can help break it up, by sharing some of their routine work, and taking on some of your routine work, at least for cross-functional duties with natural overlaps. Working in silos is exhausting!
Creative work, and creative solutions to outdated processes, are also nice ways to break up monotony, but it is harder to estimate, because it has never exactly been done before and desired outcomes are more subjective (Ideas are usually floating in our heads more than it is described on paper for others to see and different expectations result. Tie it down in writing if you can. Working through project management templates provides you the storyboard with or without artwork sketches.). Some positions are either not creative positions in their normal job functions, or do not provide as much latitude to experiment with new ways of working through creative development projects so it’s difficult to get good at estimating its work and duration, but you can pick up a “street smarts” understanding from all of your chores.
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When I wrote a book over a year or two (work time) during a 15-year period (duration), I went about it all wrong. I was doing a lot of learning and wayfinding and working on it an hour here and an hour there sporadically. That’s life, but a duration that is set too long gets overwhelming and out of reach! Still, part of me thinks that maybe the experience of that is what it took to figure things out.
Once I had enough experience to really understand how to write well and the process to go about doing the work, I was able to prioritize it as my #1 activity each day, free up my mind for it, and get it done. I was able to devote a full-time effort during a leave of absence. I was able to rewrite it entirely, cranking it out in 2 months, by writing scenes (It’s a film novel) and weaving them together for 6 hours a day with a 2-hour respite built-in (which I used to people watch at the park, take a walk or hike, listen to music, or read books to keep the creative juices flowing for the next days ahead, allowing myself to jot down notes if any random inspiration popped into my brain. When trying to take a step back from the work I could see the big picture more clearly and new ideas flowed into my mind.)
I think it is helpful to break up creative work and rote work (no “w”), especially if you are a “one-man band” filling different roles on a project or “wearing different hats” as a one-man business. Just try to keep from switching between work activities and tasks too often. My ideal day breaks up the work into two types of work between time block durations of four hours in the morning and four hours in the afternoon. As a business owner, I have strategic, administrative, operational, and project work and I’m not in a place to hire help, but if I did, I would be mindful that duration and work are different, and we each need focus time and creative thinking and/or creative *collaboration time to most fluidly progress our work.
(*Note: meetings with a team that understands how to work together and appreciates it can actually be an enjoyable reprieve from keeping our head down in the work all day. Even if you are an entrepreneur, a conversation with my wife (at lunch) or commenting on LinkedIn (during 20-minute breaks), the new water cooler for isolated workers can be a good refresher between focused work blocks of time.)
We can’t schedule our work to take advantage of every single minute. We are not machines. We are far greater and more dynamic than that. We understand that duration and creative thinking time allow for a fuller experience, better work, and less burnout. We need to protect our project teams, not just appease external stakeholders, and make sure their work and duration provide the proper balance needed in their work lives to do their best work and feel good about how it worked out.