Lost in the details

Individual contributors get bogged down in their own detailed areas of work almost to the exclusion of paying attention to anything else.

As project managers we feel compelled to hold status meetings where we can brief everyone on the state of the project and what is going on.

Much more effective, especially for passive communication of project status, is printing out screens of each section being worked on, and highlighting what’s new, what changed.

And documenting the why of the decision for the change.

And that last step is incredibly important.

It is a powerful tool that takes very little time for one person (the project manager) to convey a large amount of change (the project) to a large audience (the team) without calling a meeting that pulls the team out of their flow with a weekly or monthly “all hands” status meeting.