Just-in-Time Project Management

• Attention, unlike time and money, is non-fungible
  
  • the state of mind you are in at any given moment powerfully shapes the quality of the attention you have at your disposal.
    

You spend a lot of time setting up before you start to create something valuable, but we don’t normally save them (Intermediate Packets)

1. Environment setup
   making your coffee, getting your workspace ready, clearing away desktop clutter, opening the programs you’ll need, and arranging the windows on your computer screen
   
2. Mental setup
   remembering where you left off, recalling the relevant facts and questions, re-familiarizing yourself with the remaining tasks, and “loading up” many other bits of context
   
3. Emotional setup
   facing the inner critic, confronting the fear and the doubt over whether you’re working on the right thing, and pushing through the uncertainty that is a part of any challenging task
   

1. you become interruption-proof
   «coroutine»
   
2. you have more frequent opportunities to get feedback
   
3. you can create value in any span of time
   
4. big projects become less intimidating (less sunk cost of spending a lot of time)
   
5. Reuse old packets for new projects (no heavy lifts)
   

«It is an iron triangle because its not compressible (the team has the necessary strength to keep the quality). The compressibility depends on the strength of the teams, which in turn depends on the experience»
We are used to taking orders, even from ourselves. But the true leverage in knowledge work is in the meta-work (the work of planning the work).
Because information is intangible, it can change shape and form at any moment, to fit into any span of time or any available budget.
With the three variables of Time, Budget, and Scope at your command, you have a dashboard for meta-work.

We treat information intake as a preliminary stage, where we gather research and knowledge, followed by a planning stage, where we make decisions and lay out the steps, and then an implementation stage, where we actually put that knowledge into practice.
That model doesn’t make sense in the modern world. There is so much uncertainty and things are changing so fast, it makes much more sense to dive in and take action, than try to meticulously plan everything in advance.
We need to collapse these three stages into one interwoven thread, by prioritizing interacting with information over merely consuming it.
This is known as the Constructivist Approach to Learning, which says that learning is an active process in which people “construct” knowledge based on their own experience.
The main factor that distinguishes adult learning from other kinds of learning is that adults learn to solve a problem. So of all the things we could construct, I believe the most effective is a personally relevant and professionally useful product that solves a current problem.
Content creation pipeline:

1. Seeing
   
2. Writing
   
3. Drawing
   
4. Performing
   Putting yourself in high stakes situations is an excellent way to learn, as your full attention and emotions are fully engaged
   
5. Producing
   
6. Selling
   selling is the most powerful. Because trying to sell something always puts you in direct contact with reality
   

Digital knowledge (is an intangible asset, so unlike physical products) has:

1. Structure can be added later
   This isn’t true for physical work, restructuring is not only frictionless but the best possible way to do things
   
   • Defining a structure too early can be detrimental
     
   • «It’s better to not have structure than to have a bad structure»
     
     1. consumes time and attention
        
     2. blinds you to ideas not fitting the structure
        
     3. may create unnecesary structure/complexity
        
     4. requires a lot of effort that can make you back out
        
2. Features can be added later
   once again, it becomes the best possible way to create new things.
   
   • Adding too many features too early can be detrimental
     
   • «Adding new features is easier once a structure is set up»
     
     1. consumes time and attention
        
     2. dilutes your focus on what is important (featuritis)
        
     3. may create unnecesary complexity for your users
        
     4. requires a lot of effort that can make you back out
        
   • Launch a container, the fill in the features slowly over time via releases (discrete packets of incremental value delivered to users)
     
3. Purpose can be added later
   
   • Settling on a purpose too early imposes perhaps the most serious risks
     
   • «You can repurpose a digital item for another task more easily than a physical item because copying standarized bytes is nearly free»
     
     1. consumes time and attention
        
     2. constraints what’s allowed and what’s possible
        

Flexibility in outcomes is one of the most powerful features of digital knowledge work.
—

• 
  
• Intangible assets suffer from market failures of non-rivalry and non-excludability
  

4. Start everything as late as possible
   directly from Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM) by Eliyahu Goldratt, based on Theory of Constraints
   attention and people are now the most important constraints in projects, instead of time, machines, or raw materials
   
   • Identifying the critical path gives us major benefits:
     
     1. It tells where to start
        
     2. It tells us what to prioritize (whichever task is currently on the critical path)
        
     3. It tells us the soonest possible completion date for the project as a whole
        
   • Avoid “early starts”
     Defined as kicking off a new project with a flurry of activity as everyone gets to work. This seems only natural – there’s a lot to do, everyone’s excited to start, and no roadblocks have yet been encountered.
     This feels like progress, because everyone is busy and tasks are being completed left and right
     
     1. It’s esasy to lose focus on the tasks on the critical path
        
     2. The tocal cost ballons immediately, raising the stakes for “getting it right” stifling experimentation
        As opposed to starting a core team on the critical path first, and then slowly adding others as they’re needed.
        
     3. The critical path is often the longest path because it includes ambiguous tasks like research, testing, and discovery
        These are also the tasks that produce the most learning. By performing the bulk of the work early in the project, it doesn’t benefit from that learning, often necessitating expensive changes later on to correct mistakes.
        
   • With late starts, we push tasks as late as possible on the timeline.
     This tends to create clusters of tasks just before key milestones
     
     1. The amount of time needed to perform tasks is reduced, by limiting the amount of time available to work on them Parkinson’s Law
        
     2. By adding people to the project as late as possible, you avoid yanking them from other projects, only to wait around with nothing to do as the critical path finishes
        They also have all the information and learning available
        
     3. It creates a collaborative culture where everyone understands the importance of the critical path
        Instead of optimizing for task completion (whether or not that task is on the critical path), it focuses everyone’s attention on the critical path
        

Appart from late starts, you also need:

• Downscoping and upscoping
  
• Placeholders
  
• Intermediate packets
  
• Convergence and divergence
  

Just-in-Time PM also requires significant changes in the culture and politics of teams:

• Collaborators have to trust each other implicitly, because they will be sacrificing their own productivity to enable the productivity of others on the critical path
  
• Collaborators must have strong alignment and buy-in on the purpose of the work, because late starts prioritize the overall project at the expense of any single component
  
• Managers have to trust in people’s ability to self-manage and take responsibility, because late starts make projects more vulnerable to underperformance by any single contributor
  
• The environment must be one of openness and candor, since scheduling constraints can easily lead to unrealistic expectations and pressure
  

At the same time, the potential benefits for digital teams are proportionally even greater:

• Spreading out tasks in shorter, more intense sprints (interspersed with easier work and time off) aligns more naturally with human rhythms, as opposed to a steady state like a machine
  
• It becomes easier for contractors and outside collaborators to work on such projects, because they can be called in only when needed, and then quickly disperse (which in turn makes it easier for more people to become freelancers)
  
• Not starting everything at once leaves more room at the beginning of a project for high-impact, creative activities, such as ideation, experimentation, and drawing on other disciplines (which have to be done early to be useful)
  

Just-in-case → Just-in-time

• heavy lifts → intermediate packets
  
• perfect solution → evolving solution
  
• deep focus → placeholders
  
• early starts → late starts
  

5. Create subcomponents as early as possible
   
   • Start late and take anticipatory actions
     With late starts we push all the fast, but risky activities (deciding, combining, producing) as late as possible, which creates space for Principle #5 to bring all the low-risk, but time-consuming activities (researching, summarizing, annotating) as early as possible.
     
     • If you think/suspect/know something is going to happen, start now
       
     • Search for anticipatory actions that are valuable even if the project they’re intended for doesn’t pan out.
       
   • This is called Component Thinking
     which recognizes that every product is made up of smaller subcomponents.
     
   • Benefits of having many subcomponents
     
     • Each one gives you optionality, increasing the number of options you can consider
       
     • Each one can be reused in different projects, allowing you to leverage past work
       
       • «This means subcomponents have to be standarized»
         
     • Each one can remove uncertainty, making future projects less risky
       
   • Digital products
     With digital products, subcomponents can easily come from different sources, evolve at different speeds, and be substituted for each other.
     We can take advantage of this modularity of digital products, there’s no need to wait until everything is done ⇒ send beta versions, early drafts
     
     • Impermanence
       The impermanence of digital work can often feel like a curse. Nothing ever seems to be finished. We rarely get to celebrate a clear-cut completion. But we can turn this fact to our advantage – if nothing is ever final, there’s no point in waiting to get started.
       «(You cannot take away a leg of a bridge, but you can do so in digital projects)»
       
     • Design vs production
       When building a bridge, perhaps 10% of the work is in design, with the rest being construction. With knowledge work, it is the opposite. The actual production of knowledge work deliverables is so fast and cheap it might as well be free, whereas the difficult intellectual labor of design constitutes 90% or more of the work.
       
   • The best subcomponents are those that:
     
     • Answer questions or test assumptions
       
     • Need to be done anyway
       
     • Simplify or speed up future projects
       
     • Make future decisions faster or easier
       
   • Fear or starting ambitious projects because of high risk and uncertainty
     People are often afraid, they never take the actions that would allow them to reduce that uncertainty.
     By postponing heavy production work, we create time and space for thinking about and bundling together subcomponents. These subcomponents stand on their own, while also preparing the ground for quick execution once we pull the trigger on project execution.
     For each subcomponent, we can find out if there are existing products or services we can use, further reducing uncertainty. And if we have to build a subcomponent from scratch, we at least can put boundaries around the uncertainty in the form of a small project.
     

6. Multithread projects to make progress on many fronts simultaneously
   
   • Features of digital projects
     
     • They often encounter roadblocks or delays due to unforeseen events
       
     • They often lead to impasses or blind alleys, as certain approaches are found to not work
       
     • They are often highly collaborative, requiring communication loops
       
     • They often require feedback or testing, which also takes time
       

To take advantage of the benefits of multithreading, it’s critical that you begin to think of yourself not as a lone project manager, but as a project portfolio manager (PPM)

• Choosing the right projects to start (good inputs)
  
• Maximizing project completions (good outputs)
  

When determining the return on our attention, our natural inclination is to focus on throughput, which is how many projects actually get completed.
It is not throughput that matters so much as throughput per constraint unit. If you remember from Part 2, unlike units of time or money, not all units of attention are created equal.

These parts have a numbered principle:
10 [1-3], 11 [4], 13 [5], 15 [6], the last three ones are more or less also techniques

1. Structure can be added later
   
2. Features can be added later
   
3. Purpose can be added later
   
4. Late starts: Start everything as late as possible
   
5. Component thinking: Create subcomponents as early as possible
   
6. Multithread projects to make progress on many fronts simultaneously
   
   1. This is implemented using a
      

The enabling techniques are:

5. Iron triangle (downscoping and upscoping)
   
9. Placeholders
   
4. Intermediate Packets (turn Heavy Lift into Slow Burns, )
   
8. Convergence and Divergence
   
6. Evolving deliverables
   

Common themes

• Digital projects have different qualities from a physical project, but we often manage them as a physical project by inertia
  
• attention is
  
  • the scarcest resource in digital projects
    
  • non-fungible unlike time, money (you have to manage it emotionally at the personal level)
    
  • Flow [2,3]
    
  • Interaction over consumption [7]
    
  • Personal productivity networks [14], not really attention
    Maybe the coupling between the product management and human attention domains
    
  • Effective RoA [16]
    
  • States of mind [17]
    
  • Motivational waves [18]
    
  • Explosive inspiration [19]
    
  • Speed as a capability [20]
    
  • Workflow strategies [21]
    
• Interruptible work [3, 4, 9]
  
• Downscoping [5, 6, 10, 12, 21]
  
• Learning [7]
  

Snowden, D. (2002) “Just in Time Knowledge Management Part I” in KM Review Volume 5 Issue 5 November/December 2002 pp14-17
Snowden, D. (2002b) “Just in Time Knowledge Management” in KM Review Volume 5 Issue 5 November/December 2002 pp14-17 and Volume 5 Issue 6 January/February 2003 pp24-27