Your project management software can’t save you

when I work As a copywriter at a dog toy tech company, we use Airtable and Basecamp to organize our workflows. At my next job, the marketers had us learn Asana (“same as Airtable but much better”), but the product team pushed their work and sprints through Jira. They fired me before I had to learn Jira, and at my next job they swore by Airtable, which, Phew, Already knew. But apparently they were still missing out on efficiencies and Airtable took the blame. As I was leaving that job, I overheard someone mention that a new program, Trello, was going to replace Airtable and “change everything” for us. I returned as a contractor a few years later and everything had not changed. The company had left Trello and was now in thrall to something called Monday.com. It also promised big changes.

If you work as an “individual contributor” (engineer, copywriter, designer, data analyst, marketer) in the modern administrative workforce, you’ve probably come across one of these project management software (PM software) companies. Your onboarding will include an invitation to collaborate with companies like Smartsheet, Notion, Udemy, ClickUp, Projectworks, Wrike, and Height. The list seems endless and yet somehow it continues to grow. More than a hundred Proprietary applications and schedulers are currently competing for enterprise business, all promising greater productivity, seamless workflow, and unmatched agility. And if, like me, you’ve been ping-ponging between a couple of jobs and project teams for a few years, you’ve had to accept the fact that misunderstandings and confusion are natural in any large workforce. But in an era of increasingly digital and increasingly remote work, you could still imagine that a “killer app” would actually win. And yet, none of these project management software services get the job done. The key to these shortcomings lies in the very history of workplace efficiency, starting with the original business consultants.

Solving for efficiency

Before second industrial revolution, productivity practically did not exist. (The word itself basically did not exist before 1900.) As factories became more complex and wage workers proliferated, the goal of capital became to ensure the efficiency of its work. If you connect your workplace annoyance with too many Trello notifications to the plight of a machinist construction lathes in the 20th century It makes you dizzy, you are not alone. But the idea of ​​making sure you work efficiently is as old as the idea of ​​having a job.

And so, the 20th century marked the beginning of what we know as project management. According to Frederic Taylor The principles of scientific management, The goal of managing workers “should be to ensure maximum prosperity for the employer, along with maximum prosperity for each employee.” At the same time that Taylor, a mechanical engineer, rose from the factory floor to become one of America’s first workplace narcs (or consultants), another engineer, Henry Gantt, popularized and codified the basic concepts of Gantt chart, a simple bar chart that converts a project schedule into a set of lines on the x and y axes, with time moving from left to right. Also called the “waterfall” method, Gantt charts create a visual metaphor for tasks and their dependencies and contingencies so that you can view each individual task in terms of when it should start and when it should be completed, in relation to the overall project and tasks. tasks. coming before him.

Are you a graphic designer waiting for photos and text to arrive before you can design an advertisement? In many of our modern project management software applications, you can see those prerequisites, such as in the modern Gantt charts offered by Monday.com, Wrike, Microsoft Project, and Click Up. Asana also has Gantt templates.

Taylor and Gantt were figuring out how to manage the work of a factory machinist, whose job, like Lucy’s at the chocolate factory, typically involved a repeatable task. But the growth of the information worker means more generalists, consultants, analysts and managers, and more hierarchy. On a construction project, for example, as long as rebar is installed, the concrete crew can pour the foundation. Similarly, the factory worker doesn’t have to see the Gantt chart to make his part of the widget, he just needs to know what to do. They do not have to participate in creating the chart. They do not have to interact with the graph. In the formidable Hoover Dam project (its construction was organized using a Gantt chart), the workers who poured the concrete did not have to self-manage that task and at the same time consult their Gantt charts. In the days before information work, task workers (individual contributors) did not have to govern themselves; they were the governed.

Working with information, on the other hand, is more easily managed using the methods developed by Gantt. In an information workforce, there are infinite vectors of stakeholder feedback, debate, approval, and review, not to mention infinite vectors of stakeholder feedback, debate, approval, and review. contact points. (If you feel like your workplace is bloated with managersyou’re not alone.) Software that mimics an old way of setting up project dominoes is the source of our workplace frustration and the beginning of do-it-all solutions that end up simply creating more work.

Critical Paths to Roadmaps to Infinite Options

Did you know that the Manhattan Project is also part of the glorious history of project management? Increasingly complex problems need increasingly elegant solutions, and you can’t go from an idea to an atomic bomb in a few years without efficiently organized parallel work paths. The observations made by some engineers on the Manhattan Project led to the creation, in the late 1950s, of critical path methodan algorithmic model that creates a mini map (a bit like a decision tree) of all parts of a development process or project. Each node and path are assigned time values, and a computer works out the fastest (or cheapest) way to reach the end with all the necessary tasks completed. Combine the critical path with that of the US Navy. PERT method, a similar system was developed simultaneously and project management has moved into the computer age. Around the same time, kanban (in Japanese sign) was developed at Toyota to gain more efficiency from lean manufacturing. Kanban, a manual system of cards and signals, also gained popularity.

When software development becomes a more legitimate management field (in the 1980s), we also have The “law” of Fred Brooks which claims that adding labor to delayed programming projects only slows them down further. The truth behind this idea (that “onboarding” complex tasks takes more time than saving them) is one of several factors that lead software developers to work and develop scrums, a more flexible way to communicate during work projects. open. , like programming. Scrums are arguably more revolutionary than the critical path, kanban, or any of their predecessors because they present a format that adapts to the functionality of small teams with short-term objectives. Scrums helps programmers get work done quickly and then do the same on the next project.

You can look at a critical path graph and think: Hey, that sounds a lot like a product roadmap (a somewhat useful-looking combination of the waterfall portion of a Gantt chart and the path-dependent layout of a critical path). Or you might consider a kanban board and think: Okay, I can get used to it. this. But notice that Asana advertises its fluency in kanban, critical path, and scrums, as well as a newer term: agile. The PM software represents itself as Frederic Taylor in the late 19th century, traveling from place to place and assuring factory owners that his system can be applied equally to carpentry and industrial laundry. The difference is that Taylor had a one-size-fits-all solution; PM software sells itself as a jack of all trades and also a master of all.