Manage Project Tasks Responsibly
Don’t leave your most critical work to chance
How does your team track project work? Is it Jira, Smartsheet, Azure DevOps, GitHub, or some other project management application? Perhaps it’s simply an Excel spreadsheet? The tool or combination of tools your team uses is your team’s work management system. But this should not be confused with your own work management system, sitting in your External Brain1. Your system is inside your Triage Shield2 and your team’s system is outside your Triage Shield.
It is common for people to simply defer to their team’s system in the management of their individual work. It’s really attractive and convenient to do this. Your team’s system is already tracking the priority, the estimated cost, and the estimated completion date of all of the teams’ tasks. Why create a second system for yourself? It seems redundant.
There are three reasons why this breaks down.
Your team’s work is one input into your entire workload. You may be part of multiple projects, getting work input from two distinct project plans. And even if you’re just working on a single project, you will inevitably have your own individual work that you need to make progress on. Perhaps it’s your own ongoing learning and development that you need to “timeslice in”. Or there is some required corporate training that you have to complete. If you use the team’s project schedule as your own schedule, you run the risk of never prioritizing other important work outside of that project’s schedule.
You are not in control of your team’s project management. Every team member participates in the upkeep of the project, which includes adding new tasks, removing obsolete tasks, reassigning tasks, or otherwise updating the scope of tasks. This can undermine both your management of work and your execution of work. Remember, your work is inside of your Triage Shield which means it must be under your complete control.
Your team’s work management system is a high level view of the project. You are limited in what level of details you can provide for each task you own. This stifles your communication with yourself. In posts such as “Life’s a Journey; Take Good Notes”3, I’ve underscored the value of increasing the amount of notes you keep for yourself, not restricting it. A great way to accelerate your progress on any given task is to leave a paper trail that you can revisit each time you return to the task4.
Your team’s work management system is an input. It’s a very important input. It may very well be the single biggest input into your system. But it is nonetheless still an input. And it is not in your control. By definition, if it is input that is out of your control, it belongs outside your Triage Shield.
The Triage Shield for your team’s work input will turn these tasks outside of your control into tasks that you do control. These triaged tasks will land neatly in your shielded work management system, intermingled intentionally with the other responsibilities you have, such as triaged tasks from a second project you’re involved in.
Let’s define the triage process for accepting work from team projects into your work management system.
The First Triage: The Team
Your team has an established triage process for accepting tasks into a project. In the planning and design stages of a project, many if not all members of the team will be generating potential tasks that are needed to produce the desired result. The team members responsible for project management (some combination of people managers and project managers) will then go through all of these tasks to organize them, prioritize them, cost them, and assign each to an individual owner. Along the way, missing tasks will be added and unnecessary tasks will be deleted.
The end result is a complex but complete task list with all the necessary information to take action on these tasks. The team’s triage nurse has done its job of corralling disparate inputs into a cohesive execution plan for the project.
The Second Triage: You
Each member of the team will take the output of the team’s triage process as the input to their individual project work triage process. Wearing your triage nurse hat, you will decide whether or not you accept each input and convert each accepted input from whatever project management format it is in into a standard representation of work in your system.
Your project work triage process has the goal of blending work from a single project with the rest of the work you have committed to, such as individual work or work related to other projects.
Your Projects and Your Actions
In my External Brain post1, I detailed the components of my work management system5. The two main parts that we need to leverage for project work triage are:
Actions: tasks that you can complete in one sitting
Projects: complex tasks that cannot be completed atomically. Projects are made up of Actions.
A terminology overlap shows up here that needs to be called out to reduce confusion. A team is manages its work through a list of projects, with each project being a list of tasks. Individually, you are managing your work through a list of Projects, with each Project being a list of Actions. Your individual Project maps to a single task in your team’s task list for a given project. This hierarchy will help you visualize how these two concepts connect.
Team
Team Project
Team Project Task == Individual Project
Individual Action
When accepting a project task into my work management system, the first thing I do is created a new page in the Projects section of my system. Then I will construct an action plan on that new page. As I identify concrete steps, I will create a new Action for each of those steps. Each Action will point back to this Project page so that, whenever I’m working through my varied collection of Actions, each Action will provide the context I need to readily complete that Action.
Following my Action format, each of these steps will have an estimated time recorded for it, which means when I’m done building out my action plan, I have an estimate of the total time for the Project. I will record that estimate back in the team’s project task. This is a great example of the differing levels of detail between these two systems. At the team level, you just need to provide a cost. But at the individual level, this cost is backed by a detailed action plan.
Top-Down Meets Bottom-Up
Drawing from my “Play Your Part” post6, let’s take a look at this from the top-down and bottom-up perspective.
When the team constructs the plan and delivers the project list, that is a top-down setting of the direction for the team. When the individuals incorporate their part of the project’s work load into their work management system, this is the opportunity for the bottom-up confirmation that the project plan can work.
When you are done with your triaging, you will have a clearer picture of all the work that you have committed to. If you end up with more work than you can complete, then this is the start of the conversation with management.
Are you assigned too much work for this particular project? This becomes a balancing conversation between you and the project leadership.
Are there other projects that you are working on that are demanding too much of your time? This becomes a load balancing conversation between you and your manager.
Are there individual initiatives that are the reason you don’t have the space? Then this is a conversation to have with yourself on relative prioritization.
Successful project planning and execution relies on complementary top-down direction and bottom-up feedback. It’s not a conference table of authorities and subordinates. It’s a round table of equals trying to refine a plan.
Show Progress
As you are executing on your work, every time you complete an Action, it’s a perfect time to update the corresponding task in the team’s project list. It can be as simple as updating estimated time remaining, or it can be additional notes on challenges or efficiencies that you discovered along the way. This will provide a steady heartbeat of progress reporting to the team that will be minimal overhead in your own process.
Footnotes
The “OneNote as my Work Management System” section of External Brain