From ganttheads to Kanbangers?

Mike Griffiths is an experienced project manager, author and consultant who works for PMI as a subject matter expert. Before joining PMI, Mike consulted and managed innovation and technology projects throughout Europe, North and South America for 30+ years. He was co-lead for the PMBOK Guide—Seventh Edition, lead for the Agile Practice Guide, and contributor to the PMI-ACP and PMP exam content outlines. Outside of PMI, Mike maintains the websites www.LeadingAnswers.com about leading teams and www.PMillustrated.com, which teaches project management for visual learners.

  Agile  

The recent rebranding of gantthead to ProjectManagement.com with the explanation that project management is no longer synonymous with Gantt charts got me thinking about what tools agile project managers use most often. If geologists of the future unearthed the desk of a 1992 project manager, they would find Gantt charts, network diagrams and computer-based scheduling tools. Skip forward 20 years to the project managers of 2012, what would they find? Index cards, task boards and planning poker cards? What plunged project managers back into the dark ages? Was there a 10-year power outage?

Tools tend to restrict plans (and their flaws) to only those people with the tools installed. Since tools are costly and require training, not all team members have them--so we lose insight into the plan. “But our tools have free viewers!” the vendors claim. But viewing is not the same as building or using, and we really need all our team members using the tool to be able to spot missing tasks and all the dependencies.

It’s a little like a well-known concept: you don’t read a bicycle, you have to ride a bicycle to understand it. We want team members to help create the plan rather than just look at one created by the team member furthest away from the technical details (the project manager). By actively creating the plans and revising them based on actual …

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