Project Management is BS: an inspirational meditation for modern PMs

This past week, I had the luxury of attending the Digital Project Management conference in Austin. If you are a project manager and you haven’t heard about this group of awesome digital PMs, you are missing out. The first time I attended one of their events, I thought, finally! These are my people! People who actually do what I do at Cloud Four. My tribe.

What do I do, every day? What do digital project managers actually do? It’s mundane stuff, folks. In any given day, I write a ton of emails and Basecamp threads, review lists — many, many lists, in many different forms. I pester people in every way imaginable. (Letters. I’ve written actual letters at times.) I listen, a lot. I run conference calls, I Skype, I Hangout, I Slack, I SIP into meetings. Today, I slacked, then hangout, then called the same person in a 10 minute period. This is not glorious work.

It occurs to me frequently that this is work that really anyone could do. In fact, the tools we use are often designed so that anyone on my team is empowered to use them.

Want to schedule a meeting? Great! Lucid Meetings makes this really simple. It even walks you through agenda creation and attendee selection! (You know you need an agenda for every meeting, right? Make them good ones, too.) Want to ask the client a question? Perfect! Hit them up in Slack, or Basecamp. You don’t need me.

Sometimes it feels like the work we do is complete BS.

This is not the most encouraging thought to be having about your chosen career.

But here’s the thing: the reason we have project managers at all is because most people are not thinking about these things. Your project team is so heads down on the work they are doing that they don’t think about the overall project progress, or the political implications of asking a certain question, or just the right way to deal with that nagging change request. They don’t worry about the overall budget impact of that bug that was just found in QA, or how the hell you are going to schedule one extra sprint when you’ve got two other projects starting that same week.

They just don’t. But YOU do. And YOU are really freaking good at it.

[cue the inspirational music]

YOU wake up in the middle of the night, wondering why that one stakeholder didn’t seem engaged in your kick-off meeting that day.

YOU can’t shake that feeling that something isn’t right about that call you just had with your developer. She didn’t really say anything, but you know something is off and how to suss it out.

YOU know exactly how to load your project teams to maximize efficiency without overloading them.

YOU can evaluate a budget overage, report it to the customer, and offer alternatives that are actionable and clear.

YOU inspire and motivate your team to keep on keeping on.

YOU see patterns of inefficiencies in your organization and have ideas on how to address them.

And this is not just about making sure that someone (anyone) is tasked with these types of things. It’s making sure the right person is leading it.

This stuff is our DNA. And it’s not mundane or ordinary. It’s essential, technical, precise, and difficult work. It’s hard and soft skills. It’s invisible, yes, but like my ever-so-talented colleague Tyler Sticka described it, we’re like the project’s nervous system. The developers, designers, and other project team members are like arms and the legs, moving the body around, but they’d be paralyzed without a good PM to make sure signals are going where they need to be.

Like Nancy Lyons said in the closing DPM keynote, “We are change-makers, we are thinkers, we are do-ers.”

That’s some really cool, important BS, if you ask me.