Who should create the task lists that people use at work? Should a manager, or should each person be allowed to create their own list?

These are questions asked in a blog post today by Seth Godin:

“If you made the list instead of just obeying it, would you be a more valuable member of the team.”

A task list is generally not an isolated set of to-do’s. A task list is a specific slice of an overall project or process. Its the slice that’s relevant to the person responsible for getting those things done.

If each person made up their own task list, it would impossible for a team to function together or for a group to get a larger project done.

But, individuals can be a powerful force of creativity. Individuals can provide new ideas on how to get things done.

A good manager can unlock these ideas. A brave individual can propose these ideas. And a healthy organization has a culture of communication that promotes speaking up.

That’s what a friend who heads the client service group at an interactive agency complained about over lunch. He wanted to know how he could stop his implementation team from being late.

I asked how they currently communicate.

“For each implementation we submit a ticket through a home-grown Microsoft Sharepoint based system. The ticket has the date submitted, the general scope of work and the due date.  They then let me know when an implementation is ready to go. Or, I have to pro-actively call to find out the status of an implementation. Then, inevitably, I have to call the client and tell them their launch is going to be late.”

I suggested putting together a short work plan that described the steps the implementation team goes through to prepare for a launch. In his case, there are generally 5 major steps, each with around 10 sub-tasks. To start with, skip the sub-tasks. Make a bullet-point list of the five major steps. This will give you and the implementation team a single point of reference to gauge the progress of the project. 

Instead of touching base only when it is due, you can touch base at each of the 5 major steps.  This will bring more visibility into the process. It will also give you early warning of when an implementation is starting to run late, before it is actually due, so you can do something about it.

This is a first step. 

This also sets the foundation for more sophisticated and accurate planning using start and due dates for each step and estimating hours, as well as being able to scale the process through resource planning and project templates. But that can come later. The first step is to map out the implementation process in easy, big block steps that become a basis for meaningful communication.

Tasks lists can be super helpful for creative firms or creative departments (e.g. art departments, interactive agencies, internal marketing or communications) to get more done, manage processes better and to get better information on their work (including tracking billable hours). They can also kill well meaning attempts at implementing project management.

People usually get tripped up by making task lists overly detailed, trying to map every single step in a process. On the other end of the pendulum, people make tasks are so broad that they become meaningless and don’t add any value to getting things done or to providing information to managers.

For project management efforts to succeed in a creative environment, you have to get the task list right. It has to be the right balance between a traditional work breakdown structure (WBS) and an MS Excel based to-do list.

The way to figure out the right combination is to start out by deciding exactly:

A. Why you want a task list i.e. what you are using the list for and

B. What do you want to track i.e. what kind of information you want to track on your projects.

Here are a few of the things tasks lists can be used for along with some guidelines for building truly usefull tasks lists and project schedules around them.

1. Creating Templates. Templates make life so much easier. Once you’ve come up with the right level of detail on your task list, make a template out of it and re-use it for every project. If you do several different kind of projects, create different templates for each one.

Templates have a ton of benefits.

• Templates make it fast and easy to populate a schedule with tasks, dates and even resources and time estimates;
• Templates provide consistent names of tasks so that you can run task reports that compare the status of the same task across all projects and you can;
• Compare how long specific tasks take on one client versus the other or one project versus the other.

2. Categories for Entering Time. The task list becomes a framework for items your team can enter time on. As a rule of thumb, each task should be something to which at least 20 hours of time will be spent. Group together related activities to make up those 20 hour plus tasks e.g. “Browser Testing of Website” instead of “Testing Website on Safari”, “Testing Website on IE8″ etc. On projects lasting 3 months or more, the threshold for a task should be 40 hours or more.

If multiple people are assigned to the same task or if different bill rates are used on different projects, use work types or categories of effort to distinguish the work one person does on a task from the work another person does on a task.

3. Controlling a Process. Here, the manager or team lead creates a task list so they can monitor and give team members specific direction on the steps they need to take. This is an illusion. A manager can specify the projects, goals and deliverables on a project but it is pretty near impossible to make a list of all the tasks that go into the work a creative professional does. Set up major goals as milestones or critical tasks. This will make it easier to track progress (see next item).

That’s not to say that a manager can’t better manage the resources on a creative team. But instead of trying to map out every step of the process, focus on prioritizing which projects and deliverables are most important. This will get you a lot farther than telling someone which steps of the process to work on.

To get a handle on how long a process takes or where there might be room for improvements, spend time with the creative professional to understand how they do their work. Be open to learning, start a dialogue with the professional and be constructive in working together to find process improvements.

4. Track Progress on a Project. Here, the task list is a tool to get a sense of how far along you are in the process of producing specific deliverables. Given the above mentioned difficulty of listing every step that goes into the creative process, focus on having the team members give you an update on the percent complete of a task or deliverable.

For example: instead of having 10 subtasks under “Testing a Website” and determining percent complete by seeing how many of the 10 subtasks are checked-off as done, creating a single milestone task called “Testing a Website” and have the team member enter in that they are 40% done with that task.

(Project management geek-out note: If you track actual versus estimated hours on tasks, as well, you can compare the number of hours used against percent complete to get even more information. This is back of the envelope earned-value management.)

Flagging a few tasks as milestones or as critical tasks will help you focus your project management efforts on those items that impact delivery the most. And if you have trouble getting team members to update the status of all tasks, asking them to update the status of only milestone or critical tasks can be much more palatable.

A Word About Schedules
As a side note, much of traditional project management and traditional management software (like MS Project) will use a critical path to auto calculate a schedule. This idea comes from a world where processes flow linearly and in a relatively predetermine way -and where people often have a small number of things on their plate. This isn’t the case with art departments, agencies, marketing, interactive or with just about any creative processes in general. For a creative group, project management can’t really be about critical path. Its more about getting the right information on a process, increasing efficiencies, great delivery and making good decisions. Other approaches can stifle.

In a creative process, therefore, instead of an auto-calculated critical path, the schedule should be determined

• By your commitment to your client (whether internal or external) and
• Critical tasks should be those which you manually indicate as being of critical importance to your project and schedule.

This gives you and your team the room to apply your own experience and expertise to setting up a project schedule. While, on the other hand, you’re still setting up crucial project gateways that need to be met to effectively track progress, manage the project and delivery on time.

The first, and often hardest, step to starting with project management is creating a task list.  Many people try to think of everything that goes into a project or job, write that down, then want to capture the changes between one job and the other by tracking which were the specific tasks that were different.

The idea behind this is that people want to better visualize their process so they can track how different reality is from the plan, where delay’s happen and where they can improve things.  The problem with this approach is that no two jobs are ever the same. No two, super-detailed lists are ever going to be the same. You’ll spend more time changing the plan then recording data.

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