Artistic process and project management
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Slides of a talk I gave to a bunch of PM's covering the outline level; of my thoughts on how PM's can utilise the artistic process to create more value and make their jobs more fun while also changing the business.
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Artistic process and project management
- 1. THOUGHTS ON PROJECTS Richard Adams @dickyadams www.radams.co.uk
- 3. HEAVY COMPLEX ENGINEERING So much of our traditional work process was designed for the engineering age Each stage needs to be checked thoroughly and tested as cost of reverse is too high and often impossible
- 4. ENGINEERING BASED APPROACHES This is partly why the standard stage gate approach emerged.
- 6. LEAN AND AGILE EMERGED … for a very good reason
- 7. AND THAT’S FINE IN SOFTWARE DEV, BUT….
- 8. WE SIT HERE WE END UP WITH WAGILE
- 9. ONE SIZE FITS ALL? ONE SIZE FITS ONE Methodologies, even though they imply freedom, end up being implemented in rigid ways
- 10. SO WHAT NEXT, JFDI OR BETTER?…
- 11. ICONOCLASM
Notas do Editor
- In any type of PM role we face inertia. We sit firmly between the pull of ‘this is the way we have alwsys done things’ and ‘this is what the process dictates’
- Most of the processes we use were divined from methodologies rooted in the engineering age. Often each stage of a big engineering process had to be thoroughly designed upfront and tested before the next stage – this is the origin of the stage/gate approach.
- As a result we got Prince 2 style processes that were often cumbersome and expensive to manage. The thing is though that Prince 2 and similar needn't have been so – they were explicitly designed to be delivered on large and micro scales. People with no imagination though just implemented them across businesses often that didn’t need it. They could have just taken elements of it but no they rolled the whole lot oyut and for PM’s on micro projects this could be hell.
- As I said, in heavy engineering or mainframe days this stage gate approach worked wonderfully well due to cost and scale. As things changed with the digital and web explosions pressure to change came from below…
- Developers began to demand lean and agile approaches to their work and largely this was because they twisted processes to suit and by developing in this way it reduced tensions and allowed them to iterate more rapidly, designing software as they felt it needed to be designed.
- Trouble is, businesses started using the words Lean and Agile in ways that weren’t actually true. These processes and methodologies were and are software dev methodologies…
- And so we find ourselves caught in a situation that is often WAGILE. Where businesses run as Waterfall or Stage Gate models but develop using Agile. The PM has to sit in the middle of quite incredible tensions.
- In lots of businesses we end up trying to create a one size fits all approach and it doesn’t really work.
- So do we just f get on with it or is there a model that can be used that can help PM’s shape things their way?
- Artists and the artistic process has been around for thousands of years. Artists are often thought of as rule breakers but they aren’t, like PM’s they have a process that is often rigidly followed but of course it allows them some freedom. One of the strengths of art education is that you are often asked to look at the shape around objects nit simply the object. One of the things that PM’s and businesses rarely do is ask what shape would things be is we removed our products? What is happening at all the edges of our products and what is the impact and shape of the ecosystem in which they sit?
- The artistic process is not dissimilar in nature to Agile processes but it does look at things from a different angle. PM processes are often all about reporting, measuring and recording. Artists produce work in order to ask new questions. Every painting in a gallery is both a finished work and a set of new questions.
- The artistic process is flexible enough to make strong use of collaboration and iteration. It even stands up to dispute. Discourse mediates, but discourse needs you to become a really skilled listener. Always ask Why? in multiple ways until you understand the real drivers. Great work is produced through this process and I would say, most of the truly creative interactive product dev we see now emerges from companies that, even unknowingly.
- To me the jokingly called JFDI process is simply people failing to understand that this is how artists actually work and create and it is the opposite of random. Every test an artist makes is to learn. Like children they push buttons and peel things back, turn things over and without a fear of breaking them.
- For me, a new age PM and new businesses have to begin to build in this level of test and play; this experimentation method. This systematic approach to test and build and this means thinking like an artist. The PM caught in the tension of everything can start to push back and change things but only If they think in the way artists so. I’m not advocating removal of requirements, measurement etc. but I am saying that requirements might look completely different for each product not just templates filled with text…so think like an artist and take control.