Digitising Project Management (or, when the tail wags the dog)

If there’s one thing predictable of human beings, it’s our sheer predictability.

Faced with an absence of options people do what they’ve been doing because it’s, well, predictable.

A little like when Einstein (a fairly reliable source of observation and assessment) said the definition of stupidity was doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result.

Which leads me to that confounding conundrum of how we project manage stuff. When I say “stuff” I’m interested principally in building (just a modest $12 trillion per annum sector globally), but project management is project management.

It’s, naturally, nuanced from sector to sector but it is what it is whether it’s building bridges, houses, databases or building apps.

The issue though that continues to confound me most is, why is project management so complicated? I mean it shouldn’t be, should it?

But it is and why is project management technology invariably so distressingly complex (that’s a statement, not a question, because it’s simply inarguable).

Having studied hundreds, if not thousands, of project management tools/apps/software globally, it struck me that even in this mobile first era, where technology enablement is mobile ahead of desktop, why then do most resort to the complex over the opposite, as almost all tech tools seem to do.

Notwithstanding the bewildering fact that most project management tech still isn’t mobile first, let alone mobile at all.

Let’s face it, shoe horning spreadsheets into a mobile is like painting zebra stripes on a hippopotamus, it makes no sense at all.

Essentially project management is all about maintaining visibility (if not vigilance) and control over the myriad moving parts involved in a given process, and all the levers involved in that process, to deliver a project within a defined set of parameters and constraints.

Straightforward enough.

But it shouldn’t mean that visibility of all that’s involved has to be presented as an archaically complex thing (as it normally always is, there’s Einstein again). Particularly when any user is invariably mobile and needs to access, view, share, update, relay, transmit, etc, etc, data remotely.

Surely it’s a UI proposition to overcome? It could be, no, it certainly should be.

UI done right simplifies the presentation of data, if we want it to. I know it can because we’re doing just that.

I know it takes innovative thinking (hours, days, weeks, months, etc) but that innovation is rooted in the contradiction that is simplification.

Speaking of spreadsheets, ever tried looking at a Gantt chart on a smartphone……it’s like looking an eclipse without protective glasses, it fries your eyes!

So, with eyes scalded, we thought surely it doesn’t need to be so incredibly messy and so challenging to view?

We soon discovered that it didn’t because we threw out the old box and we built a new one.

By their very nature, almost every project management tool retreats to the position of complexity (and therefore retreats to the desktop), rather than trying to simplify the UI to achieve something far more organic or native even, let alone mobile first.

The principal objective has to be that of complex data presented simply, natively, in a mobile first form. And that’s where the dog’s tail is wagging away to it’s heart’s content (not the tail wagging the dog, which seems to have been the case until now).

We approach it differently because we believe that people can better respond to information composed and presented natively, if you give them the opportunity to do so and months of user testing has proven to us that they will, and they do, and they are in ever increasing numbers.

People can cope with our reinventing the presentation of data, particularly when it comes to building and construction — particularly when it’s just a case of simplifying that presentation, making it even more accessible.

In a recent report, global consulting giant McKinsey said that building and construction is the second least digitally enabled sector of any industry on Earth, second only to hunting.

I mean, wow, who’d have thought hunting was still a thing, let alone an industry.

Anyway…the fact remains that there’s plenty of scope to shift people’s thinking and behaviour, because they’re clearly not wedded to what already exists, not by a long shot.

They’re using it (if at all) simply because there’s no better alternatives. So the circle of life (in this case, information) continues on unabated, unchanged.

With due respect to Mr Gantt Chart, time’s up. You’ve had your run, well done, but it’s time for the dog to start wagging it’s own tail.

© Tony Huxley 2020