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And so,

at work we have just finished a major piece of work. We celebrated, with a glass or two of wine, and a relaxed weekend. However then, as my wife put it, the bubble burst, and it was clear that things were largely as busy as they had been before, and all the lesser work that had been shoved to one side, had not obligingly gone away.

Last week was actually pretty busy, Friday being a relatively busy Friday, with a quite a lot to get sorted out. I’ve also got a couple of temporary staff, and I do constantly worry about being able to give them enough work and supervision to keep them busy and engaged. They are only here till the end of the month, but all the same.

Chatting to someone before I left on Friday, she said that I should be thinking in terms of going for a promotion for my next post. I also had a chance to get out of the office and give a presentation. For me presentations are always fairly nerve shredding, and are either triumphant successes, or embarrassing. Fortunately this presentation went exceedingly well, no doubt largely down to the material itself rather than my delivery. However in total now feeling pretty positive about myself.

We were also talking about project management, which is very much the recommended methodology for managing work now. I explained that I did impose a light project management methodology onto the work for a while, but could not do so throughout, as I did not manage the overall process throughout. It was also difficult to adopt project management because to project manage you need to start with an agreed specification. In our work you don’t really know where you are going until you are almost there. There is a broad policy direction, and broad indicative outputs, and a broad indicative budget, but in terms of staffing there is a degree of flexibility. Accordingly you cannot plan ahead in much detail, it would really not add much value. You can however project manage in the sense that you do a bug hunt - looking for problems that will impede delivery, and then dealing with them.

Lessons learnt -
* you do need someone as the overall project manager, even if they are not the senior person in the project, you need someone with a big picture.
* I managed on the basis that I asked for things to be explained until I understood them, and they sounded possible.
* you can only project manage when you have time to actually act on what you have agreed, if you are all obliged to run about firefighting, there is not much value in a meeting until you have put the fires out
* if you have project managed upto that point then you are hopefully putting out the right fires
we ran with regular meeting of the core team, with an annotated agenda, which was prepared with all the key facts, the meeting was used to agree key issues
* the annotated agenda, also served as a minute, with agreed actions and outstanding actions
* outstanding actions were left on the page until done or superseded
* actions were always ascribed to someone, but largely we did not set dates
* the annotated agenda was regularly updated and served as the master data for the project
* if you never take leave, work all the hours it takes, relentlessly follow up on issues, and sort out everything that can impede delivery, you will make progress
* people seconded to the team are unlikely to be so ruthless, understandably, to make sure they deliver on time, you would need to actively project manage their work for them.
* This is only worthwhile if their outputs are key, if they are simply desirable you will need to live with the fact that they are unlikely to deliver on time
you need to be flexible about what you are delivering, it helps to explicitly argue out what would be desirable against what is realistic.
* in the end it all comes down to the art of the possible, with proper management you can achieve the seemingly impossible, but only by not doing a lot of stuff that everyone thinks you are doing
* you are still human, being rude and trampling over people will not achieve anything, having time for people, is actually refreshing when you are worn out,
* you need to leave time for yourself, the project is likely to go on for longer than you can work flat out.
* Set your limits for what hours you can work, and then stick to them, otherwise you simply end up taking sick leave to compensate.

Stewart Brand has put forward something called shearing layers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shearing_layers

this really applies to buildings and comes from ecology, but I think it has some applicability to project management. There are levels of detail that you can deal with, to differing extents. You need to be realistic about what you can plan and control, and what you simply do not have enough information to deal with. Accordingly you know your overall objective, but the finer detail is not yet apparent. However some work has a longer lead in so you need to firm up that aspect of the project.

Intuitively that is how I work. If I am making a piece of furniture, I decide on the overall function and materials quite early on, but the finish is only decided at the last minute. I do not create a detailed plan, but simply sketch ideas for how to joint the pieces on a chalkboard, and work down from the overall dimensions that the item cannot exceed.

I took a course in making furniture and we had to plan the item before we did anything, I’ve never worked like that before or since.

I suppose you could work up thoughts on the various layers, but really you need to work this out for yourself, if you cannot work it out for yourself, then you won’t understand the dependencies well enough to manage the work anyway.


In order to get through the mountain of lesser work that everyone thought I had been doing, that had been quietly shelved, I was in at the weekend. I deliberately decided that this was not just another day doing the same work. I used it to try and target material that I was aware needed done and was long overdue, and the boring document management which I quite enjoy. Deep down I am probably a thwarted librarian.

As readers of this blog will realise, the opening of a milk bottle inspires me to reflect, so I reflected...

* whatever way you slice it, my journey in to work is excessively time-consuming
* I would like to get out of the office more with some work of my own, rather than simply supporting other people
* the backlog of work is vastly bigger than just a day’s work !
* there are a lot of opportunities around where I am now