Tales from the Trenches - Project Management
"I need help managing my time, I am working all day but not seeming to make any progress"
I received this message from one of my direct reports in the middle of the workday. This is around 4 years back, just around the time COVID hit and the startup I worked in shifted to remote work.
Curious, I asked him - what was on his plate. He mentioned a couple of items, all parts of a big initiative. Along with this a bunch of customer-reported bugs and a few cleanup-related tasks we had to do.
This guy had delivered very big complex initiatives before - why the sudden change, I couldn't understand well.
"Did you try this technique called bullet journalling?" I say, "I have been using this for a while now, and it works pretty well"
"I will try it out"
A few days pass and I check in with him in our scheduled sync-ups.
"Are things better now?"
"Yeah, it seems like it. I am writing a lot."
End of the quarter, his performance review comes up. Going through his work, I saw that there was a slump that never really recovered. It was around the time that he had messaged me and apparently, that bullet journalling thing hadn't helped him as much as I thought.
"Hey, how are things now?"
"I am still unsure of where my time is going. But I have the notes which means I am working every day."
Apparently, just building awareness of how he was spending his time didn't do much.
I pointed this out to my manager, Abhishek and asked him for input.
"Have you outlined and charted out his work"
I disliked project management to my core. It was soo ..corporate.
"I have given him high-level milestones with deadlines. But he seems to keep missing them. He seems overwhelmed all the time"
"Why don't you do a more fine-grained breakdown of what he will do on a day-to-day basis to hit his goals? And keep buffers of a day every 3-4 days."
Ugh. This went in the direction I didn't want this to go. Nevertheless, I thought that conforming might be better - given that my new-age productivity lifehack hadn't really done much.
The next quarter, I took each milestone and broke it down into distinct deliverables. Then broke down bigger deliverables into smaller ones.
Took a minimum assumption that even the smallest task would take 4 hours.
Ugh.
A month in, I am staring at my laptop screen with my eyes wide open.
I want to scream.
We are on track.
Project management apparently works. Ugh.