You’re a Distributed Project Manager Now

Bart has been in ecommerce for over 20 years, and can't imagine a better job to have. He is interested in all things agile, or anything new to learn.

  Agile  

As the pandemic spreads through the world, many companies have been faced with sending their employees away, without much preparation or appreciation of the impact it would have. Employees are being told to work from home if they can, and that “remote” working would be the norm for the foreseeable future. This is not just emailing a few documents to yourself so that you could work on them from your kitchen table, or making sure you stayed productive while you awaited a plumber or cable guy to come and repair something. For a project manager, this means more than simply keeping busy and constructive, it means keeping others productive, delivering for your customers, and ensuring that stakeholders remain informed and up to date, as well. Many of these tasks are difficult in the best of times – it’s why we make a whole profession out of it – but now it will be extra hard, as we are all forced apart without any training or even much warning.

Even calling it “remote” project management isn’t accurate. Remote project management is nothing new, but it involves the project manager being somewhere different than the rest of the team. We’ve been doing this for decades, from construction projects to the NASA control room in Houston, and there are known patterns to follow. Rather, what we are dealing with is distributed project management; everyone is in a different place. This is a far…

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