Project management - not just for project managers
Summary
Project management tools aren’t only for project managers. They foster work autonomy and a sense of calm in distributed teams. But despite their benefits, these tools aren’t popular. I address a few common objections to using such tools in this article.
I’m too busy
I’m too creative
We must select the best tool
I find our tool mind-numbing
Our team prefers a different tool
I work solo, so I don’t need a tool
In my last post, I wrote about how effective, team-owned processes enable moonlighting managers. Last week, James Stanier argued that managers' involvement in the details is no longer optional. Looking around, I notice that pure management roles are becoming scarce. Companies seek efficiency and throughput. Teams don’t need taskmasters and overlords.
But if managers don’t play taskmasters or reporters, how do their teams track, manage and prioritise their work? Well, it’s a problem that the lean movement and agile software development solved years back through the concept of a visual workplace. Kanban boards, burn-down charts, and visual roadmaps are familiar tools from this notion of a visual workplace. As knowledge work became distributed in the 2000s, these analogue tools made their way into more sophisticated project management platforms, like Jira, Asana, Trello and the like.
Project management tools are unlikely to be crowd favourites. Not even among project managers. But I think of these tools much like I think of restrooms. They aren’t anyone’s favourite places to be (exceptions notwithstanding), but it’s hard to imagine a functional home or building without them. These tools don’t just reduce annoying taskmastership. They bring several other benefits.
The team can own management tasks. For example, Kanban boards make bottlenecks visible so the team can swing into action whenever such blockers arise.
Progress is transparent. Everyone always knows what everyone else is up to.
Since we track all progress digitally, it’s also straightforward to automate reporting.
Most importantly, the team can work calmly. To make my point, let me cite David Allen’s book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity.
“You must use your mind to get things off your mind.”
Allen said that the more tasks and obligations we keep in our heads, the more we constantly reprioritise them, the more we get anxious, the less we do what we’re supposed to do, and the less we focus on the work at hand. My paraphrasing, not his words. To avoid these open loops, Allen advises the idea of “full capture”. No biggie. Anytime an idea, task, to-do or action comes to your mind, and you can’t process it right away, add it to a system.
Once commitments are off your head, you organise and prioritise them in the system itself. Your calm head can then focus on the most essential tasks in a state that Allen called “mind like water.”
We’ll return to Allen and give a hat-tip to Cal Newport later in this piece, but I want you to imagine the calmness benefit that project management tools bring to a team. If a team's hivemind is always grappling with tasks and priorities in its heads, it creates way too much cognitive load. I don’t need to tell you that a low cognitive load leads to a better work experience — DevEx researchers already said so.
Unsurprisingly, the world’s most effective distributed teams - i.e., open source projects, use tools like GitHub to organise their backlog and track their issues. Contributors can focus only on the feature, bug or improvement they’re engaging with. It’s a liberating feeling when you can just do your work!
Now, you’d say that you know all this already, and good on you if that’s the case. Get on “team tools,” and let’s change the world, partner! But before we advocate for these rather un-sexy project management tools, let’s answer some common objections.
I’m too busy. I’ll tell you what to do, and you can play around in Asana.
I once had a boss who claimed to be so busy that they were above all tools. They’d spring up tasks in meetings, emails, and instant messages, often at odd hours of the night since we were working in different time zones.
To be fair, our boss never explicitly undermined the project management tool. But when the boss doesn’t live in your work management platform, there’s little motivation for the team to be any different. Shallow work would always fly around on point-to-point channels. There was no prioritisation, reflection, work cycles, or visualised workflow. It’s evident why I was always stressed and dissatisfied working on that team, chasing my boss’s latest whim.
Suggestion: reduce the blast radius of your requests
It’s just as easy to add work into a project management tool as it is to shout it out over email and IM. Get the mobile app for your project management tool and use it to add whatever work comes to your mind. If the mobile app is too hard, find a way to create tickets or issues in your project management tool using email or IM. If you want to act like a client and not a manager, review these inputs once a week with one person in the team. Let them be the buffer between you and everyone else. That way, you reduce the blast radius of your communication.
If you want to be a manager instead, conduct that weekly review by yourself. Analyse your ideas, break them into constituent steps, and prioritise them alongside other work. Make it easy for your team to identify and execute the most critical work in the queue.
My work is creative. There’s no way I can track it in Jira!
“Work is not just about getting things done; it’s a collection of messy human personalities trying to figure out how to collaborate successfully.” - Cal Newport.
A friend once worked with a designer who claimed they couldn’t fit their creative work into the rigid confines of a project management tool. In a small team, when one person boycotts a project tracking tool, they disrupt the idea of a shared workflow. Indeed, that one designer held the team to ransom because they claimed their work was above transparent tracking.
Suggestion: make tooling a non-negotiable workflow characteristic
Recognise this simple truth. Ideas are cheap; execution is costly. Even when it’s subconscious, execution involves some standard steps. You prioritise amongst the ideas in your head. You decide the sequence of steps to implement your idea. Then, you execute each step, often reaching intermediate milestones in the process. Guess what? Project management tools help you with this process of prioritisation and execution while keeping your colleagues aware of what you’re up to. Real-time transparency isn’t an optional extra on a distributed team. It’s a non-negotiable requirement.
If you manage a team, distinguish between work execution and workflow, as Cal Newport recommends. “Creative” or not, individuals should execute their work autonomously. But while different tasks may need different approaches, the workflow should be standard until the team decides to change it. No matter how “creative” someone believes they are, it shouldn’t be up to an individual to choose their workflow.
I like Monday.com, not Trello. We should use the best tool.
Most large companies have multiple tools to do the same job, and project management tools are no exception. One operations team I knew recognised the need to track their work on a tool, but they couldn’t decide between Kanbanize, Monday.com, or Trello. Everyone advocated for their favourite tool. I kid you not: the team continued to use the hyperactive hivemind workflow of emails and IM because there was no consensus about which tool to use.
Suggestion: Using a tool is more important than the specific tool you use
We’ve already discussed all the benefits of using a project management tool. As a corollary, you also know the disadvantages of not using such tools. In 2024, it’s safe to say that most tools offer the same capabilities and a comparable user experience. The differences aren’t significant enough to waste time and energy. Toss a coin or spin a wheel - whichever tool you land on will be an upgrade over emails, IM and meetings. As long as everyone on the team can access the tool and is familiar with its basic functionality, you’ll be golden.
My mind freezes when I look at a Github issue tracker.
I use GitHub’s issue tracker as an example because that’s the tool that numbs my brain. Others may have a similar reaction to Jira or Notion. I agree that the default interfaces of many tracking tools can trigger a visceral adverse reaction among us. However, I disagree that the way to deal with that adverse reaction is to boycott the tool. Tools enable workflows, and tooling decisions may often be above most people’s pay grade. It’s more constructive to find ways to get with the program.
Suggestion: Investigate how to sync from a tool you’re comfortable with
As a product manager, I often use sticky notes on Mural. Sometimes, I even write long-form content on Google Docs to help me unpack my thinking. Other times, I use spreadsheets to build structured lists. I may even build sketches to flesh out the idea for a prototype. In short, I live in multiple tools. That said, I also have a way to get my ideas and tasks onto the team’s task board.
I use Trello’s email-to-board feature, along with the Mail Merge plugin for spreadsheets, to transfer ideas from spreadsheets to Trello.
Gemini helps me convert Google Docs and sketches into development tasks in a spreadsheet that can be imported into any project management tool.
Tools like Mural offer ready integrations with project management tools like Jira.
Services like Zapier and IFTTT can help you build syncs from spreadsheets to platforms like Github and Gitlab.
So, if you can’t think inside your team’s project management tool, start outside. Make it easy on yourself, but take responsibility for joining the mothership. With time, you’ll get used to the team’s tooling; even if you don’t, you won’t hold the team back.
Oh, but our team uses Pivotal. We can’t get onto Jira with you lot.
Some years back, I worked on a team that had to collaborate with a few other teams in the organisation. One of these other teams provided our team with a service. While we waited for them to complete their work, the related cards would stagnate on our wall, with no progress indicators. We proposed that our collaborators from the other team could join our task board, but they refused because they used “another tool”.
IT suggestion: One purpose, one tool
I understand the inconvenience of tracking one’s work on multiple tools. So, I don’t blame our counterparts in the other team. IT teams must rationalise internal tooling so there’s only one tool for each purpose. Not only is this financially prudent, but it also provides all employees with a common language for work. If Jira is the only tool available, everyone will use Jira. But if you leave people the choice to use Pivotal, Jira, Asana, Trello or spreadsheets, you’ll make cross-functional collaboration challenging. Collaboration challenges aside, imagine the cognitive load of learning new tools each time someone changes teams. Sometimes, too much choice is counterproductive.
If your company has different tracking tools, consider reconfiguring your project management tool to recognise this situation.
For example, if the support team uses Zendesk and the engineering team uses Jira, consider integrating those tools together.
If you can’t find or pay for an integration for multiple tools, reconsider the stages in your workflow. For example, add a timeboxed “Waiting for” lane on your Kanban board to track the work another team will do for you. The person liaising with the other team can own the task and its related updates.
When the cycle time for the other team’s tasks is longer than your standard work cycle, consider splitting your tasks into parts that your team owns end-to-end and parts you depend on the other team for. That way, you can track your progress and learn more about your bottlenecks.
But I don’t need project management tools. I work alone.
All those objections bring me back to Allen and Newport. There’s a common misconception that project management tools are only for teams. People argue that they needn’t use such tools since they work solo. Solo work may not need collaboration, but it still benefits from the same full-capture discipline that David Allen advocated for. Cal Newport simplifies this approach into a three-step productivity funnel.
| Step | Description |
|---|---|
| Capture | Gather all work-related tasks, requests, and obligations into a centralised system such as a task board, a project management tool, or even personal tools like OmniFocus, Notion, Todoist or Things. Example: Authors log their ideas, drafts, feedback, admin work, and social media commitments in a system like Google Keep instead of managing them through scattered emails or post-it notes. |
| Configure | Organise and structure your work according to priorities, deadlines, and milestones. Remember that solo work can include multiple projects, and different projects can have different workflows. For example, I have a different workflow for managing my websites than for organising my writing commitments. I use three Trello boards to manage sumeetmoghe.com, asyncagile.org, and my writing commitments. I plan my trips using Notion and Google Sheets, and I follow through on other personal commitments using Nirvana. |
| Control | Do the most critical work on your list, and don’t let interruptions derail you. At any given time, you should be able to look at your system and identify the next most important piece of work for you to do. Time block your calendar, and get cracking — one thing at a time. My approach to multi-scale planning is one of the most popular articles on this website. In that piece, I share how I control my time and focus on the activities that matter most to me. |
Cal Newport’s productivity funnel
Newport’s productivity funnel aside, using a system allows you to be transparent with yourself, your colleagues and your manager about what you’re doing. If you’re diligent at using these tools, you’ll also have solid data to back up your performance reviews. That should be incentive enough, shouldn’t it?
And so, I believe everyone must embrace project management tools, even if it feels like you’ll choose a root canal instead. These tools aren’t sexy. It’s far more seductive to rush into action and thumb your nose at the rigour of these tools. You may look quite macho that way. But I argue that by living in the here and now, your best ideas fall prey to recency bias. The newest thought will usually feel like the most crucial idea to execute. If you’re like me, your ideas will overwhelm you to the point of inaction. A little attention can help us avoid these traps. Which brings up my conclusion with another famous David Allen quote,
“If you don't pay appropriate attention to what has your attention, it will take more of your attention than it deserves.”