The Spectrum: Freestyling to Process
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:
- 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.
] - 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 …
6 Responses to “The Spectrum: Freestyling to Process”
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April 21st, 2009 at 14:04
In my experience, Process weenies are incrementalists and not completionists. They need that checklist to feel like they’re accomplishing anything … but when you ask them about the big picture, they fumble for words and more often than not point at the process as the big picture.
April 22nd, 2009 at 22:00
Being one of the “process-oriented” types, I’m not entirely sure I agree with what you’ve stated here. Granted, I’m not a program manager. I’m a step or two below that, but from my perspective process keeps us from screwing ourselves over. Here’s an example:
I just got back from testing a software release at my customer’s site. There is no documented process on how I get my test products from the customer’s CM (there’s a process on our end of how they’re delivered to the customer and it’s followed to a T.) down to the test floor. As a result, during the migration down to the test floor several things went wrong, but with no process, no one contacted the right people to indicate that there were issues. Then, when I went to start my testing, I was using the incorrect versions of files, which caused several of my tests to fail. Because there was no documented process, of course my customer blames me for having screwed something up.
Now that I’ve got everything fixed and got my software tested, we’re going back and forcing the customer to have a process (doesn’t that just sound hysterical?). Process would have prevented a lot of these problems and of course my program management supports process… once things have blown up and I’ve illustrated why enforcing process earlier in the program would have prevented these issues… *sigh* I think I’m what they call a process champion at my office….
April 23rd, 2009 at 08:07
Kat – there’s no such thing as “no process.” The real driving influence in the difference of thought between Freestylers and Process Weenies is the level of formality. And I think the level of formality is generally driven by (1) the level of complexity of the environment you’re in and (2) the competence of your personnel.
Process is foremost a communications medium – a means of saying what you’ve accomplished and where it is. At heart, I’m a Completionist Freestyler. But if I can tell that my engineers are not as competent as I am, I start to become a Process Nazi to make sure they get their work done in a manner that I can expect to have some level of confidence in their product.
It really is a spectrum, and I set my team’s spectrum setting based on our environment and their ability.
April 24th, 2009 at 11:13
Processes are important. Don’t get me wrong. But processes take time, and time is not always available. Process is great for workflows, and I’d argue necessary; I don’t find that I can manage via a process, though. At best, a process for me is a checklist of things that I have to get done to make other stakeholders happy.
April 24th, 2009 at 21:30
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May 18th, 2009 at 15:37
Your first comment [sorry, these got held up in the spam filter], Spencer, has me thinking … hard. Dangit.