How To Organize A Project

For fun, not profit.

Evan Spence | 2008-02-05

  1. Commit to a task according to the client’s schedule. Best case will suffice.
  2. Assign someone to work on the project. Someone with good hair.
  3. Project details are valuable and prone to change. Ration them accordingly.
  4. As the task deadline approaches, release details in inverse proportion to the time remaining.
  5. Call your team members often with new client requests—or some of your own—but be sure to give them a break by periodically not calling or emailing at all.
  6. Assign additional people to the project as needed, using the linear T/N equation, where T is the time required for an given task, and N is the number of people added.
  7. If, for whatever reason, the project doesn’t scale linearly when people are added, compensate by stretching the denominator: Have staff just assigned to the project work lunch hours, evenings and weekends until the equation fits.
  8. The variable N need not vary from person to person. The more skilled will pick up the slack of the less experienced. This way, you can add limitless staff to a project without regard to bothersome and technical skill sets.
  9. Meeting times prior to office hours work best.
  10. Send cryptic messages from your Blackberry forwarding information sent to you. Entitle them “FYI” and mark the task as complete in your mental Gantt chart. Subject lines are for sissies.
  11. Re-send the same email.
  12. Have the client contact individual team members directly, so late changes can be immediately dealt with without the waste of centralized management.
  13. Inject your own changes for the betterment of the project.
  14. Remember the principles of Getting to Yes. If the client asks, the answer is yes.
  15. Pull your goaltender with two minutes remaining.
  16. When the death march is over, reassign staff to other projects at critical points in their cycles. Hurry!
  17. Surprise the client with an unexpectedly large bill, later to be negotiated downward according to some regrettable fixed-fee letters of engagement.
  18. Revise bonuses downward accordingly.
  19. Celebrate your successes.
  20. Exclaim to your team. “You’re going to change the world!”

Evan Spence

February 5, 2008
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