It’s easy to say that there are two kinds of project managers: process-oriented folks and seat-of-their-pants folks. [One glance at the title of this site should tell you where I lie.] But really, it’s a spectrum.

I work in a group of four project managers [counting my boss, who is really a program manager/director type]. In this group, you have:

• Me, your ultimate make-it-up-as-you-go-along manager.
• My boss, who’s pretty close to me on the spectrum.
• JL, who’s pretty much in the middle.
• JE, who’s very much process-oriented

I look at this like goaltending: you’ve got your stand-up guys, your butterfly guys, your hybrids, and your Blake Webers—just throw pads and pray.

Some thoughts and implications on the style:

1. The freestyling one scales the best, until it doesn’t anymore. Your freestyling types are naturally chaotic [come look at my office and you will understand my tolerance for chaos], so you can overwork them until they break. [Hi.] The problem with these types is that they can’t ever plan anything to satisfy anyone with any kind of process orientation/numerical number-crunching. So you look behind, even when you’re not. [Or you are behind and get to panic at the end, but hey, that's always what happens in my experience. ]
2. Your process person works best in isolation. You hand them a job, set them in the direction of the goal, and let them go. But the problem there, though, is something changes, and then they want to work the change through a process. That’s great, but you don’t always have time for it. Process people are idealists/completionists. You need these people. You really do! It’s just that they, like your freestylers, have to be reined in from time to time.

JL likes to say that she “works the process until my hair is on fire, then I just do whatever I have to do at that point”. Honestly, that’s the best of both worlds, I think, and that’s why I, along with thousands of other fake-it-’til-you-make-it types, embrace things like GTD. We’re self-imposing process to keep ourselves out of trouble [and to shut the process types up when they ask for status].

Crap, it’s time for status …