Project Managers For Everything

Why every project needs a manager — and why it can’t always be you.

I made a kind of New Year’s resolution for my business, sometime around February 1. The resolution was simple: Never work alone.

No matter how small the project, I will always find money to pay someone to handle the scheduling, or do the paperwork, or take notes. The bigger the project, the more money there should, by definition, be for project management, or another researcher, or a paid intern to do desk research.

It means, of course, that I personally make a little less (or sometimes a lot less) on a project. But it also means that the work I do is better. Here’s how.

1. Project managers are momentum makers. They keep the project going. They know what’s due next, and where everything is. They know how to make adjustments to project plans so that the right things are getting worked on at the right times, and so that nobody (me) gets sucked into inaction or uncertainty. They find the bottlenecks — of process, information, money, resources, time — and they pry them wide open. My instinctual response to uncertainty about details and expectations is a combination of ‘watchful waiting’ and ‘duck and cover’ and ‘JFDI’ which is absolutely useless. A project manager’s response to uncertainty is to engineer the conditions for information to be shared and decisions to be made. Perfect, they say, is the enemy of done. Project managers ensure done-ness. Great project managers help ensure that what is done is also good.
2. Notetakers (and assistants) are intelligence builders. They ensure details aren’t missed. I interview people and moderate focus groups and record interviews for a living. Notetakers are just a necessity — because I may not have the time or inclination to go back and try to listen to the terrible audio of a focus group recording, and yet, if I want to break my own heuristics, I need the notes. (Ideally, I need transcripts, too. There are some excellent hacks for this that are sort of cyborg solutions, but I’ll list those out below.) Assistants are there to assist you — keeping your calendar straight, or replying to emails while you’re otherwise engaged or engulfed in the project, or making a list for you to execute against later. These things, which always seem to me like things I should just be able to do myself, are invaluable, because they reduce my cognitive load. I get to make decisions and be creative instead of mired down in the muck. But also…
3. Assistants are pattern recognizers. Over time they get to know you, your clients, your projects. They’ll notice when you skip a step, or spot an opportunity to add a little more value. They’ll ease relationships and provide invaluable backup when you can’t handle it all. They’ll get smarter over time, and then, so will you. Eventually, you won’t be asking them to “do this”, you’ll be bouncing ideas off them, and even more importantly, listening to them. I was an assistant to Gail Zappa for a short time, but I knew I was doing something good and useful and even important when I knew where to find something she desperately needed, or could answer a question nobody else could, and then — the cherry on top — made suggestions that could make her life a little easier and her business a little better. (Obviously, I didn’t stay her assistant, but I did go to law school because of her, and I think of my brief time working for her as a turning point in my life).
4. PAID interns are fire stokers. It’s easy to get sucked into the details, the drudgery, the doldrums of a project, especially when you work for yourself. But an intern — that you must pay — is there to learn. Learning is what made you fall in love with whatever you do in the first place. Learning what it meant and how to do it and why it matters and how to do it better and how to make it your own. That’s why you do this. But when your life is tax forms and insurance premiums and traffic and deadlines, it’s easy to forget that. But an intern hasn’t forgotten it yet. An intern will stoke the fire, will fall in love with the thing you’re in love with, will remind you why you love it, and will inevitably show you a thing you wouldn’t have noticed yourself because you are too professionalized and routinized to notice it.
5. Colleagues are project soul mates. I used to wonder why, at a consultancy I worked for, we always worked in pairs. I thought it made us too expensive, and it didn’t give opportunities for junior people or assistants to be part of our team (we didn’t even really hire any). And then, when I couldn’t get resourcing on a project, I would beg for a freelancer because how else could I possibly do it? I’ve been working for myself, often by myself for years now. But a few weeks ago, I brought one of my colleagues from that time into fieldwork with me, ostensibly just to take notes and help with writing a deck. But because she is as experienced and smart as I am, she was able to do way more than take notes. She was able to make sense of the research in real time, to anticipate what I would need in the room to facilitate good conversations, to listen in on client conversations so I would know what they were most interested in or stressed out about. And then, when she joined me for a day or two of analysis, she made connections and helped find the story in ways that I wouldn’t think of, and that pushed me to think about the outcomes in a clearer, more useful way. Most importantly, I didn’t get annoyed — about the facility or the clients or the food. I had a partner. I wasn’t alone.

What got me thinking about this? I took on a project that overlaps with my skillset but isn’t a perfect match. I bid on it about a year ago. We kicked it off about three months later. We started interviewing about a month after that, and just kept interviewing for another two or three months. I delivered a first draft for feedback and approval 6 months after the bid, 3 months after the kick-off. This month, a year after the bid, I delivered everything else. But, somehow, it’s still not done. There’s all these last decisions to be made, these last details to confirm, and then of course, we have to publish it.

Because I am a masochist, I did all of it myself. I figured out the hardware, I figured out the software, I did the scheduling, I did the interviewing, and the recording, and the transcribing, and the writing, and the speaking, and the editing, and the production, and the hosting. I asked for help, ineffectually, multiple times. I discovered I was either too late to ask for some people’s help, or too soon to ask for other’s. I had too little budget to hire someone who could do it quickly; I was in steep competition with others who had more money to spend; I didn’t have the right connections. I kept plugging away at it, I learned how to do a thing I did not know how to do before, and I’m pleased with the result, assuming it ever sees the light of day.

But I regret that I did not hire a project manager or an intern. I regret that I did not plan in advance to hire an editor or even a co-producer.

A project manager would have manufactured momentum, even in the face of team member turnover on my clients’ part, even in the face of my crazy consultant & faculty-member schedule. An assistant would have been able to clean up transcripts so much faster, and be more aggressive about scheduling interviews in a shorter span of time. An intern (paid!) would have been able to do the background research so I could be prepared to interview people faster, and could have helped highlight quotations for editing, and even could have tried writing a draft of the final deliverable. A colleague could have been part of the editing process, helping shape the narrative and see opportunities to do something really stand-out.

My therapist’s chief advice to me has been this: “You run a business. You need staff.” I do need staff, yes. But what I want is to be in a team. Project managers, assistants, colleagues, interns — they transform you from just you to a team.

Why teams are better

My resolution to never work alone has already improved my quality of life. I’m able to set aside time for deep work. I’m able to externalize my ideas and vet them and improve them because more brains are better. And I feel like my work matters because it matters to someone else, too.

I’m also held accountable. If I’m not ready for tomorrow and it’s just me, then I’m just letting myself down — which is not low stakes, by the way; it’s utterly debilitating. But if I’m not ready for tomorrow and someone else is relying on me then it’s a system failure. I come prepared for meetings.

To be honest, there’s another thing that happens when you put yourself in a team. You don’t just shore up your weaknesses, you get to re-engage your strengths. I feel better about myself because I can see where I feel smart and capable again, as opposed to fixating on all the places where I don’t feel smart or capable.

As someone who is smart but has unreliable executive function, I walk around with a narrative about my own incompetence and unreliability. The narrative isn’t true, but when I look at people who seem to happily remember every tiny deadline and are never late on a payment (or an invoice), and never seem to forget anything as important as a phone charger or a pen or batteries or whatever, I am awash in that narrative’s true-ness. If I’m so smart why can’t I also do that?

First of all, I must remind myself, I’m an adult person who has built a career and a business. I have a roof over my head, a partner, a pet, friends and peers and mentors. I make a good living. I am not in jail. I am not in trouble. That my office is cluttered, and that sewing project is unfinished, and and I keep forgetting to update expired payment details in that one app I almost never use and still haven’t remembered to make the veterinary appointment or call back the optometrist, and am still waiting on paperwork from one accountant so I can give it to another accountant so we can file our damned taxes… All that has nothing to do with my ability to live a good life.

It also has nothing to do with your ability to live your good life. We just need a team, that’s all.

Here are my recommendations for getting you a team.

• If you need a qualitative research field manager — not a recruiter, but someone who can help you craft screeners and manage recruiters and vet research participants — reach out to me. I have several I can recommend, not least among them Milly Peña, who recently saved me from my own destructive tendencies.
• If you need a senior, strategic, certified project manager to help you wrestle a campaign or product launch or other marketing effort into graceful submission, you should reach out to Laila Forster at Tuxedo Monsters, Inc.
• If you need an intern who knows about design thinking and strategy and research, reach out to me. My students at Parsons are always looking for meaningful opportunities to see how these skills manifest in the real world, and every last one of them is a joy to be around.
• For other kinds of help, ask your friends, former colleagues, or former classmates for a recommendation. Be specific — what kind of help do you need, and how much money and time do you have for that help? Your friends & colleagues probably know someone, or know someone who knows someone. You’ll find the help you need and extend your network at the same time. (True story, I asked for advice about corporate entities the other day, and a woman I am connected to reached out as someone who could help — I looked at her law firm’s client list and almost started to cry because it was so clear that she was basically the perfect person to talk to. One more teammate!)

You can also use some cyborg services to lighten the load — these are the ones I use:

• Hangouts. Talk to people’s faces. I have a few clients who are remote that I have standing Hangouts with. I have others who aren’t remote but if I can’t make it to their office, we grab a Hangout and it’s good enough.
• If you are a person who will follow your own instructions, then you should pick a task/project management tool and follow it. I like Trello for some stuff; I like Asana for others; spreadsheets always work and are basically free. A notebook (I like bullet journals) are my preferred method — nothing is real until I’ve written it down.
• The library. If you can’t afford an office or club or co-working space, please use the library. Libraries are wonderful, quiet places to get work done. And they’re all over the city. Get a library card and you can use the books to make you smarter, too. If you are capable of concentrating in coffee shops, use those, too. But the Rose Reading Room at the Main Branch library is too beautiful for words.
• Trint — I use it for transcripts. They even have a mobile app, and you can export recordings from voice memos on your iPhone directly into it, upload those recordings, and it will do a machine learning enabled transcription for you while you’re working on the next interview. You’ll still have to clean up the transcripts, but the service gets better all the time, and it’s faster than doing it from scratch. The interface is pretty great, too. ($)
• A coworking space or club. I have tried these before with little success. But I recently joined The Wing, and I’m happy I did. I have recalibrated my own expectations — so it’s less about having an office to go to and more about having a “third place”. Sometimes my schedule is nuts and I’m carrying too many bags, and I need a quiet place to work or take a call between meetings in different parts of town. Find you a place that lets you lighten the load for a bit, gives you a place to rest and re-caffeinate, and hopefully also dishes up a mean jerk chicken salad. ($$)
• I have found a preferred TaskRabbit that is way, way over-qualified to be my sometimes assistant. He helped me organize my office, and made a to-do list out of my email backlog. I’ll be having him back. His rates are entirely reasonable, and there are a lot of smart people on that service. YMMV. ($)
• I use Fin as my virtual personal assistant and have been very happy with it. The option to record a voice memo to the assistant is invaluable when I am driving (and I often am). The ability to automate certain tasks that the Fin assistant manages is also amazing (I now always have something to eat for breakfast and lunch!). And the daily email about my schedule is just… reassuring. ($)
• If you need perfect-ish transcripts and don’t have time to clean it up yourself, I use Rev.com, which is not cheap but my advice to you if you rely on notes and transcripts is, “Always budget for transcripts”. ($$)

And if you have any other recommendations or tips & tricks you use — comments are welcome. Let’s get you a team.