Round Up: Project Management

I've done a lot of project and product management in my life and I've learned to be really flexible about it (mostly because engineers always have strong feelings) but most organizations can benefit from some structure, tools and frameworks. That said, tools are only as powerful as their operators, and frameworks are just tools, too. Every project and organization has to find the right balance but if you aren't using the tools you're just going to frustrate yourself and everyone else.

--> excellent roundup of resources for remote orgs <--

Tools:

• Asana, Monday, and Trello all use the same basic "board" structure
• Airtable feels more spreadsheet like and sometimes that structure resonates better with folks. You can also create "board" views if you want.
• Basecamp has adherents but in my experience it turns out to be one more place that documents might have been stored and starts to turn into overkill. I'll use it in an org where everyone else is committed to it but I don't love it.

Frameworks:

• OKR is a tiny bit culty but it is also a solid framework for distinguishing aspirational, qualitative objectives from measurable, quantitative results. The framework is well described at https://objectives-key-results.com/ (there's a book, too, if you really want to buy in). Chalkbeat super helpfully shared an Airtable template for OKR task management.
• WhereBy.Us are heavy Airtable users. They do some super smart impact tracking and I think they manage their whole editorial calendar on Airtable. No, this isn't a framework.
• A much more straightforward / simple product approach in Airtable
• Jobs to be Done is a solid strategy for understanding users (or members) and their needs. Whereby.us wrote about how they use Jobs to be Done.
• Kanban is a manufacturing system, but it uses card structure. Personal Kanban is a book about applying the general system to life. In general, board systems are usually kind of Kanban derived. Someone else has better tools for actually applying this to public management.