I’ve been talking to a number of people lately who don’t know what project management is all about and how it can help them. They tend to think of project management as something reserved for large engineering projects or specifically IT projects. Project management can be used on projects of all sizes and in almost any field. It is a way of organizing, tracking and managing resources.

At its most basic, project management and by extension, project management software, can help them:

1. Assign people to tasks
2. Keep all those task assignments in one place
3. Let people know when to start at task
4. Let people know when a task is due
5. Give managers visibility on where everyone is on their tasks
6. Keep all that information in one centralized place

It differs from creating simple tasks lists in that tasks here, are done in the context of completing a project.

That is, the tasks are a coordinated effort by individuals working over a period of time to achieve a specific goal.

Often, that goal has a defined due date and thus knowing how people are doing on their tasks gives you good information for knowing how likely you are to hit the due date or what may need to be done to get to that due date.

Project management software provides a framework for those tasks and the projects they roll up into. It makes it easy to what’s going on. The project owner or manager can track progress and make course corrections as necessary.

Project management software, like Vertabase, can also do micromanaging with automatic email reminders to managers or team members and notifications of when things change.

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.

Prioritizing tasks is critical when you have limited resources. A traditional project management approach doesn’t work in most situation. I generally recommended a holistic approach to task prioritization.

The traditional approach by project managers using traditional project management software is to prioritize tasks based on the critical path of the project.  This critical path is constructed by defining tasks, information about those tasks and constraints.  Project management software (like MS Project) then auto-calculates a critical path.

Time and again I’ve found that this isn’t helpful to getting projects done.

1. It doesn’t capture all the variables that should go into prioritizing a task and
2. It is way too cumbersome to be useful to most people doing projects.

Instead, try a holistic approach to task prioritization.

Here are two ways of doing that. They can be used separately or together.

Subjective Task Priorities
First, come up with at least three levels of task priority. For simplicity, these can be low, medium and high or 3,2,1 -with 1 being highest priority.

These are completely subjective priority levels which allow you, as a human being, to factor in any number of variables when deciding what is important to work on.

A human being can better appreciate all the factors around a project or task better than any algorithm or decision making model. Algorithms and models can only go so far when factoring in things like human error, rework time, and things simply taking longer than planned. Algorithms also allow the project manager to be aloof from the process as a whole. This isn’t good.

An added benefit of a subjective approach is that it requires the project manager to have detailed knowledge of the production process and the business goals behind the project. That way, they can weigh everything in when deciding what people should be working on and when.

Second, when putting together a task list, label each task with the priority.

When the relative importance of a task changes, change the label and make sure everyone on the team knows about it.

Project management tools like Vertabase can help you notify people automatically. Or, just make sure you continue to communicate with the team.

Subjective Critical Path
A second way of incorporating holistic prioritization is to manually flag critical tasks when you set up your task list or work breakdown structure. The critical tasks should be those which are key for your project to be completed properly and/or on time.  Many organizations call these project milestones, though I like to reserve the term for major phases of a project.

Here’s a fast tip for making task management easy. Its called the Launch Countdown method of naming files. I use it primarily for tasks related to producing copy or creative assets.

Number all of your files or to do’s with 3, 2 or 1. Put these numbers at the start of your file name.

3 or unmarked is an open to-do or an asset before you started working on it.

2 means a first pass has been done and it is in revisions.

1 means it is complete and ready for production.

Once it is launched or in production, delete it from your to-do list or list of active files that you are working on. Move it to a warehouse or a different folder in your filing system where you keep assets that are live. In a corporate environment, this could be the general network drive where other people can access it from.

While you are working on an item, rename the files as it changes status in its lifecycle e.g. “3 write blog post” becomes “2 write blog post” then “1 write blog post.” If its in 1, the next step is to launch then the blog post itself can go into your warehouse. If you want to recycle the task, re-set it to “3 write blog post.”

Plan for Success

Your project management plan is your bible for success. Without it, there will not be a project because without a workable plan, you have no way to reach your goal. Your plan must start at with the goal that you want to achieve. Then, break down that go into workable segments. Set a timeline for each segment. Your team should know these timelines and adhere to them. This does not mean that you make a mad dash between segments. You want to allow enough time for these various stages to be achieved while still being able to meet the overall deadline. Remember, you can rework your plan to find better ways to get you where you need to be.

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