I recently led a project portfolio management workshop. Before we started, the
senior manager had sent me a lovely spreadsheet with all the projects--all 15 of them. I was concerned. I was sure they had more projects based on our earlier conversations. But, ok, maybe they only had 15 projects.
During the workshop, I asked each of the managers to write down all their projects, one to an index card. We would deal with overlapping projects (people in one group working on another group's project) once we got all the cards down.
They started writing. We got to about 55 projects, including the 15 on the original spreadsheet. That's more what I expected.
Now, they started to rank the projects. Every time they had a question about how to staff a project, the
senior manager would pick up the card and "worry" it. He waved it around. He flipped it over, side to side. He put it down. He picked it up.
At one point he turned to me and said, "You know, if we didn't have these index cards, I could have ignored this project now, and not have to make these difficult decisions." He paused for a few seconds, and finished with, "But I get paid to make these decisions, don't I?"
He does. And, now he has the tools to make those decisions. One of the tools is making all the work transparent, which is what writing the projects on index cards does.
Start with index cards (or stickies) whenever you can, to make the work transparent. Then, if you need to, such as if you have a geographically distributed team, move to some form of
electronic too. But remember, the tool will always be a second-best tool.
Index cards have a powerful effect on how we think about the work. The power of the index card is in the way it makes the work transparent to you, and in our ability to easily move them around. Use that power to see and manage the work
great point I used this same technique once during a discussion of how a process worked. The person who did the job didn't speak out much, but you could tell she just wanted to tell the boss that her thinking had little basis in reality. I had them both outline the steps involved, needless to say they were not even close.. the boss was shocked to learn that this process she thought worked so well only worked because this employee made it work in spite of the system.