Learning the Value of Project Management

I don’t like bureaucracy. I’ve typically considered it a hinderance to my work and so, over the years I’ve become quite adept at circumventing it – managing to fit in small requests outside of the process to get them resolved much more quickly. I’m not so crazy as to believe in having no process whatsoever, but I have, and continue to believe that minimizing the amount of process is necessary for speed of delivery. Up until recently, this viewpoint has worked well for me, but the limitations of this approach caused me to slam into a brick wall at full force, because what happens when there is no one to constrain me to a process? What happens when I am the bureaucracy?

Over the past year, I’ve taken up leading a project from the ground up, starting from the basic concept and under the guidance of our technical leadership. We’ve spent the past year creating plans, deciding on a solution, and preparing ourselves for a full-scale rollout to the rest of the organization. The scope of this project includes all development teams and is on a much larger scale than I’ve worked in before, which has been exciting because it’s allowed me to be involved in spaces I have not been before and influence the direction of a project in a way I haven’t been able to before.

Circumstances outside our control have caused a number of setbacks that have amounted to 6 months up to this point and my impatience to release grew as a result. And so, while my collaborator was on vacation, I decided that it was time to finally announce the project to the organization as a whole and begin the steps to roll it out. I recognized that it was not the ideal situation, but what I quickly learned was that the error was much more egregious. The reception I received was muted, as expected, but what I failed to understand was the firestorm I had created in the background. Despite holding myself out to answer questions and alleviate concerns, I was not included in these discussions by the managers. This is because I failed to understand how the organization operates.

Understanding the communication pathways between teams is critical to the success of managers and senior technical leadership, but is otherwise kept out of sight for the rest of us, even if we attempt to poke our heads up to get a look. Having never encountered this space before, I think it is forgivable for my failure to understand this particular aspect, but something that is more important and less forgivable is my failure to value project management. When I sat down and reviewed the situation, the most stark difference existed between my and my collaborator’s understanding of where the progress of the project actually was.

Since the start of the project, I had refrained from creating any tickets to track the work I was doing and instead relied on using sticky notes on my desktop. This system was one of the tricks I had to subvert having to create actual tickets while still ensuring nothing was lost – a shadow tracking system. It was a system that worked well for my day-to-day work which didn’t necessarily require in-depth tracking that might otherwise impact my team’s sprint, so it was useful, but where it fell apart was when I had to coordinate work with someone else. We managed to survive via weekly meetings that ensured any deviation was quickly corrected, but with him on vacation, this system broke down. Though the storm I had created was recoverable, it showed I still had much to learn. Had I followed proper procedures and created tickets to track and communicate the work, the situation could have been prevented completely.

Going forward, I am searching for ways to merge my current philosophy of process minimalization with the need for project management, but I think I may be reaching a new horizon where these concepts are fundamentally incompatible, or at least at odds. The phrase, “what got you here won’t get you there” comes to mind and I look forward to uncovering a new paradigm.