I recently attended BADCamp where I had the opportunity to talk shop with project managers from a number of different agencies. I had some insightful conversations and a few really good takeaways that will help me improve project management at Metal Toad. But for the most part, the go-to conversation seems to be about project management tools. Do you use Basecamp? How about Trello? Jira? MS Project? Any of the other five hundred options out there? The tools conversation seems to come up over and over again because it's easy; it doesn't force the participants to get at the meat of project management.
Stop talking about the tools first. There are plenty of decent ones out there. They all have shortcomings. There is no perfect tool. There will not be a perfect tool unless you build it yourself and are willing to invest a large chunk development time up front to build it, followed by far more time to maintain it and modify it on an ongoing basis than you'd think.
Take a step back for a moment and ponder your role in an organization. At the absolute most basic level, your job is to facilitate and get things done. To do that, you have to coordinate to the extreme to keep clients, developers, designers, account managers, and any number of other people in the loop and on task. You also have to be able to provide clear directives and to-dos, and have mechanisms to follow up and ensure tasks are completed. This delicate balance, part science, part art, is your process.
A perfect process for everyone would be like a women's sample size 8 shoe. It fits perfectly on a shoe model, but likely wouldn't fit you. You can't take a project management process that another organization has perfected, implement it step-by-step, and expect to see the same results. It fits their needs, but not necessarily yours. There is, however, the perfect process for your organization. It meets several key factors:
Once you've created a process that meets the above criteria, then it's worth revisiting tools. Figure out if there are tools that fit within that process. Talking tools with other project managers may give you some interesting leads to check out, but always think about defining a process first, and then selecting a tool. Be extremely wary of picking a tool and trying to build a process for that tool.
Next time you're comparing notes at a conference, here are some helpful alternatives to "What tool do you use for time tracking?"
If the response is, "We use [Tool Name] for [Purpose]," dig deeper. What is it about the way they use that tool that works for them? There is always an underlying process at work that centers on how to get things done and help others do the same. And when it comes down to it, getting things done is what matters, right?
As Tom's wonderful blog post put it recently, "It's Not the Pen."