Project Management is a Prioritized List

I just finished forming a new company called Crafting Bytes with Brad Cunningham and Ike Ellis.  We wanted to start taking on bigger projects using the techniques that have made us so successful as consultants.  Over time we have noticed that we do much better with the projects when we take control of the project management as well as the development rather than simply augmenting the development staff.  What is different about our project management style than the project management style of other companies that we work with?

One major difference is that we don't use scrum.   In a sprint developers spend a lot of time estimating the work.  Estimating can be important when the estimate is used to determine whether or not the work should take place at all.  However, in most cases companies were using the estimate to inform management when the product was supposed to ship, so that they could relay that information to the customer.  It would be a better idea to relay the information to the customer *after* the work has been completed.  It is much more accurate that way.  The other reason managers were requiring estimates was to figure out how much work should be completed this sprint.  So in other words managers were requiring estimates for the sole purpose of the project management methodology they were using.

The thing is estimates take a lot of time, and they are rarely accurate.  Our thought was let's forget scrum and just go with a simple Kanban board (from the Lean school of thinking).  By doing this we can save ourselves countless hours of trying to figure out how much time things are going to take, and spend more time simply doing them.

OK, so that saves a couple days every sprint, but then what is the purpose of having a project manager at all?  I admit that the project managers of many companies are totally unnecessary.  You know the type, they spend most of their time polling individual people "are you done yet".  They could easily be replaced by voice recognition software that recognizes the word "yes".  This isn't really project management, it is instead project reaction.  Project *management* would be managing the work of the project, prior to it starting.  In short a project managers job is to figure out which work is the most important and which work is so unimportant it doesn't need to be done at all.  Great project managers remove all unnecessary tasks, that is all tasks that don't lead to working software, and prioritize which features are the most important for the business and the user.  In short they control the prioritized list.

Thinking of project management as simply controlling the list of things that need to get done and prioritizing the most important simplifies the job of the project manager and helps the team achieve minimum "time to value" - a vastly underrated metric.