After weeks of brainstorming, domain searching, forceful premature balding and sleepless nights, I’ve finally decided on a name for my upcoming project management app.
What’s in a name?
For the longest time I was intensely frustrated that I couldn’t find available domain names in the project management realm. Before long I found that I was starting to settle for names that didn’t really mean anything, and were hardly memorable.
Then I started to take a more systematic approach to finding a name. Aside from all the standard naming criteria, I decided that I wanted the name to represent:
- More than just tasks. What I’m building is not a to-do list manager, it’s a much more intelligent project management assistant (a lab partner, if you will).
- More science than art. Typically, project management is a lot of guess work. I aim to replace much of that guess work with tangible, data-supported analysis.
- Simplicity & fun. Ok, it’s not likely that managing projects will ever be “fun”, but if it’s not “painful”, that’s a start.
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I try to ask myself this on a fairly regular basis. I feel it keeps me focused on building the right tool for the job, rather than just the shiniest one in the box.
Consequently, the more I’ve thought about this question, the more keep coming back to another question: How long? This seems to be the most prevalent question in project management, and is the basis for nearly every project management decision we make. How long ago did they ask for this? How long will it take to do? How long have you been working on it? How much longer until we’re done? Then, when we’re done, we ask: How long did that take? How much longer is that than we thought it would take?
There are dozens of “how long” questions in project management, and this is simply because managing a project, is managing time. People, budget, service these are all just tangible realizations of time. The distillation of nearly every facet of a project, to its most basic unit, leaves time.
So, it seems clear to me that a tool designed to make project management easier, should place great emphasis on reducing the effort required to answer these “how long” questions. Odd that I’ve yet to see one that does.
What does good project management mean to you?
Everything we do, day in and day out, can generate data, which can be leveraged to create better estimates. In fact, the more “stuff” we do, the more data we generate and the more useful it becomes.
Each and every one of us estimates poorly in our own unique way. Some of us over-estimate, some of us under-estimate, and some of us couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn. However, we usually follow a pattern of some kind. The degree to which our estimates are off generally conforms to roughly the same proportions. If we were to examine a particular worker’s estimated task completion time to the actual completion time over the course of many tasks, we can determine the approximate factor to apply to his estimates to find the actual completion time. Continue Reading
Ok, they don’t suck. But they don’t tell the whole story, because items on a to-do list rarely provide context.
For example, take a simple task, which can likely be found on many of your to-do lists, such as “Take out the garbage”. At face value, this seems like a very obvious request. But let’s assume someone is visiting, sees your list on the fridge and wants to lend a hand. Suddenly this seemingly simple task becomes more difficult to execute. Where is the garbage can? Is there more than one? Where does it need to be taken? What day is the garbage collected? What if the bag isn’t full? What about the raccoons?!
The difficulty with most items on to-do lists is that they’re really only meaningful to the person who wrote them. This is because they can fill in the gaps by looking at the task from their perspective, with their experience, and their past knowledge of the situation. As you’ve no doubt experienced, this causes problems when to-do lists are shared within a team, when revisiting an old list of your own, or worse of all, when a list is generated by an outside body, such as a client. Continue Reading
No one likes to generate estimates. They trigger anxiety, frustration, boredom and are usually inaccurate anyway.
At some point in human history, estimates evolved into something more than what they’re intended to be. Perhaps we have shady contractors, auto garages, and wedding planners to thank for the modern perception that billing a client more than the estimated value means someone has been mislead, or taken advantage of. Or, perhaps it’s the fact that generating an accurate estimate is genuinely, extremely difficult — especially given that many estimates are expected to be delivered while there are still many unsolved variables on the slate. Somewhere along the way, we’ve lost sight of the fact that an estimate is really just your best guess, based on a combination of the information available at the time and your experience. Continue Reading
