Drunken PM

Track Your Happiness helped me gain a better understand of my unique issues with determining "value", but, in general, I think happiness is not really my bag... or at least, not the driving force behind my understanding of "value". While working on this project I have been talking with a lot of people who do evaluate things that way. They see the things they have an opportunity to do as either "things which make me happy" or "things which do not make me happy". So, the prioritization happens based on the degree of expected happiness or degree of expected unhappiness.

IMHO think the true goal is to find a way to uncover the aspect of whatever you are doing that can make you happy. It sounds simple, but it requires effort and discipline... it is far easier to just give in and wallow. Personal Kanban is supposed to help you understand your work better, and it has, but my increased awareness of how I perceive the work I have to do may be the most valuable thing I've picked up doing this. 

An even though using TrackYourHappiness.org was interesting, it never felt (to me) like it was measuring the right stuff. Happiness seemed close, but not quite close enough.

After some discussion with Boz, I began rating everything I do at 3 different points:

A) How I felt doing it (-3 to +3)
B) How I felt finishing it (-3 to +3)
C) Overall mirth from having it done (-3 to +3)

One of the things I realized in tracking the work I was doing was that for some items, the simple act of finishing it off can be as valuable as getting some newer items done.  This is especially true for the ones that have been sitting on the Kanban board smirking at you and taunting you in all their undone glory. The longer they sit the more mental and emotional weight they take on. 

It is probably also important to note that how progress is tracked has a toll as well. Capturing a 3 point ranking as I complete each task was okay on a post it - until I needed to extract the data electronically so I could analyze it. I was still struggling with letting go of Things and since I knew there was a way to extract the data I used that as my excuse to formally legitimize my inability to give up my favorite app. Unfortunately, my Coach asked me to try and see if I could work out how to use it to do Personal Kanban in a manner that was somewhat similar to what I had on my physical board.

It took a few tries, but I did manage to do get set up to do Personal Kanban in Things by grouping items into categories named after backlog columns.  As I completed each task, before I checked the box, I would assign it a 3-digit number based on the rating listed above. But, I don't think I ever moved anything into Doing... they just went from not done, to done.

After a few weeks Boz and I reviewed the results and for the most part, the information they offered were things that were already been apparent. Going through this process did have one very significant  result though. It caused me to pay more attention to how I felt about each thing I was doing while I was doing it and when I was finished doing it. I became more present with what I was doing and more aware of the impact it was having - which may be a significant contributor to the perception of value.

Using Things as a way to track all this also made me keenly aware of two additional points:

1. Trying to use Things to do Personal Kanban is kinda dumb

2. It was time to climb out of the value rabbit hole

My quest to understand the "value" of what I was doing had no clear answer save for the understanding that value can be a very subjective thing. I also had begun to feel like maybe the question was not, am I doing things that are not valuable, or how do I reduce the waste created by non-value adding activities, but how do I balance all the valuable things I want to work on. So, in many ways I was back to where I started.

I have lots to do.
I want/need to do it all.
I have limited time.
I need a way to decide what to do first - always

One key difference though is that as I continue to work through this, I am becoming more aware of how I am working and why. There are things in the system which are (technically) waste. Maybe those things needs to be there to keep the rest of the system in balance.

{Insert Climactic Ending Here}

If we were machines, perhaps all waste would be bad. Waste dampens productivity. But, we are not machines and maybe those dampeners are part of how we maintain our own productive flow. In examining the waste in my Personal Kanban practice, I have observed that it exists and that the effort required to eliminate that waste may not be worth the squeeze.

Over the past few weeks I've been able to give a few presentations about doing project management on the Mac and on the iPad. I had a few requests so I thought I would post them.

The first is the presentation I gave in the Philadelphia Walnut St. Apple Store on how to manage projects using a Mac. Managing Projects on a Mac

The second is the one I gave at the PMI Lehigh Valley Professional Development Day on how to use the iPad as a Project Management tool. The iPad and Project Management

I’m just back from MacWorld and ready to get back to work. While I was there I had an opportunity to spend the week helping out in the ProjectWizards booth, showing folks some of the new things that Merlin has to offer.

While I spent most of my time in the booth, and didn’t see much of the other exhibitors, there were a few products there, which won awards, that I’ve already been using to help me manage my projects... so I thought I’d focus on them.

The Livescribe Pulse is a pen... oh, no wait... it’s a smart pen that costs almost $200. Which sounds insane, until you use it. Available on the PC for awhile, it only recently became available to Mac users. What makes it worth the price is the fact that when I am in a meeting, then pen records all the audio. At the same time, I capture notes in a special paper notebook. After the meeting, the pen can by synch’d up with a computer so that the notes and the audio are transferred to your computer for later review and storage. I’ve only been using this for a few weeks, but it has already proven its’ worth by allowing me easy access to critical information. I had a team member on a project who claimed he had not known about a particular action item which was assigned to him. I merely pointed the pen at the note I jotted down in the meeting, tapped the pen to it and it played back the audio of him saying “Ok, I’ll take that as an action item.”

I’ve written in here before about my continuing efforts to get better at using some version of GTD to manage all my work. There are a lot of products out there. Some of which are really good, some, not so much. Things, which has been receiving a lot of attention lately went to version 1.0 last week and is now able to sync with the desktop client on the Mac. Between the easy interface, the level of detail it lets you get to and the fact that I can now work off of either my desktop or iphone (or ipod touch), it is definitely my app of choice for managing the onslaught of tasks I am still not quite able to get done each day.

The last thing I want to mention today, is Merlin. I’m a huge Merlin fan and have been for a number of years. If you use a Mac, and do serious project planning, it is the most robust client available. For me, the line in the sand was the ability to separate work and duration. None of the competing products allow that level of planning. For a while now, the desktop has also allowed you to imbed things like register items and documents (project plans, change requests, etc.) right into the plan, making them available right from the client. It also lets you read and write MS Project files. But Merlin is making another huge leap with the ability to share to the web and iPhone (or iPod Touch) that allows a real time update back to the client or server version of the project plan. This means I can serve my project file from the desktop or server and have my Windows and Linux users update their tasks from the browser window and I can see updates the moment they make them. There is no check in process - it feeds directly in over the internet. With the iPhone (or iPod Touch) I can not only look at my Gantt Chart on the device, but I can make the same updates and they push across the internet back into my plan in real time. I can even view the documents I’ve embeded into my project schedule on the iPhone (or iPod Touch) if the file type is one the device can read (like PDF).

It has been a few years since I’ve looked at trying to get Project Server implemented anywhere, but the last time I checked, the cost to get it set up for testing in an enterprise environment was upwards of $100K (US). With the new Merlin capabilities, I can get all that set up and running, including the cost of a new machine (it will run on anything that has 1 GB of RAM and can run 10.4.9 or higher) for under $2K (US).