Using Project Management Software Correctly

Yesterday I talked with Amy Adkins--former producer at EA Salt Lake--about her thoughts on project management software and how I can use it to be more effective in general, because I was having trouble seeing the use. After talking, its use became very apparent if any of the three conditions are met:

1. You want to organize the vision of the entire team by ranking the importance of different tasks in the development cycle.
2. Your team is on a specific deadline you have to meet.
3. You're working on a large/long-distance team, and need to coordinate the efforts of multiple people.

Project management software is first and foremost a tool to prioritize and coordinate the efforts of a team. With this ideology, project management software can be used for absolutely every project that has more than one person, because each person on the team has a different idea about what kinds of things are most important.

Producers have the job of ranking this priority not only in what should be done, but what can be done. If a team is on a specific schedule, project management software comes in handy to give an overview of the total time a project will take. Often, the choice to cut a feature has to be made after the schedule for a project has been developed and not enough time exists to develop every feature. When a specific amount of hours to complete a project are established, the price of adding new content and/or features becomes much more apparent.

While both reasons above have certainly applied to me in years past, it wasn't until working on a large team that the purpose of project management software finally hit me in the face. Working on a team with 10 or more people is significantly harder in all respects--there are that many more visions of the project you're working on, there are that many more priorities, and more specifically, there just isn't enough time for a single person to coordinate all the efforts of people by keeping up with them individually.

However, using project management software--like Hansoft--still seemed to take more energy than it was worth because nobody on the team bothered using it. Amy explained that Producers and project managers have a responsibility to create a team culture of checking Hansoft on a regular basis, because it can do an infinitely better job of coordinating team efforts than people can. When looked at from that way, I can get more team product per effort I put in if I spend energy creating that culture and updating software than I would putting it directly into managing people. It's not completely intuitive, but it makes sense.

I asked Amy to critique my use of Kanbanpad--project management software I'm using for 3colors development, and her biggest critique was that I hadn't organized things in terms of priority, but rather by type of task. That really resonated with me, and I quickly began to see what I was missing. Project management software is supposed to be a place where any team member can go and quickly assess the most effective thing for them to do for the project at any given time, and I changed the structure to reflect that.