Episode 24 – Holiday Gifts for the PM

ANDY CROWE ● BILL YATES ● NICK WALKER NICK WALKER:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  Every two weeks we get together to discuss what matters to you as a professional project manager.  Whether it’s how to get certified or how to create successful projects, we get input from leaders in the field and draw on their experience and accomplishments. I’m your host, Nick Walker, and with me are the in-house experts, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates.  And Andy, it is holiday time.  It seems like every time I turn on the TV or the radio, I hear somebody talking about finding the perfect gift for that person on your list. ANDY CROWE:  And all the sleigh bells in the air that you can hear.  Let me ask you a question.  Has anybody else had an issue with really well-targeted ads coming at them over the Internet? NICK WALKER:  Oh, oh. ANDY CROWE:  It’s been alarming this year how well they’ve figured out what’s going on in my head. BILL YATES:  They know Andy.  They know what Andy wants. ANDY CROWE:  They know.  That’s correct. NICK WALKER:  They know it before I know it.  All right.  So we’ve got gifts that we want to talk about for that perfect project manager on your list.  I guess we want to answer the question:  What’s in your stocking? ANDY CROWE:  You know what, Nick, one of the things we’re thinking about here, some of the project managers get to give a gift to themselves through some of this.  So it’s not so much that maybe you’re buying these for somebody else, but maybe you’re buying it for yourself.  And Bill and I were talking about this as we were preparing for the podcast.  You know, it’s funny, as we look at tools, as we look at technology, one of the things that really always resonates with me is the fact that it’s the process underneath it that really matters.  The technology just facilitates that process. When I started my career in project management, somebody handed me a copy of Microsoft Project and said, “Go and make a project plan.”  Nobody ever taught me how up to that point.  Nobody taught me how to estimate, how to schedule, how to even think about decomposing the work and putting the fences around the scope.  And suddenly I was expected to make a project plan.  So the idea is we’re going to cover some tools.  We’re excited about this episode because this is a lot of fun.  But at the same time, if you give somebody a better word processor, it doesn’t make them a better writer or a better communicator. BILL YATES:  Right. ANDY CROWE:  If you give somebody a better tool, it doesn’t make them a better PM automatically.  And these things will just facilitate getting them there once the process is in place. BILL YATES:  And we get mesmerized by these new tools.  Sometimes they’re... NICK WALKER:  Oh, yeah. ANDY CROWE:  They’re shiny. BILL YATES:  They are shiny, and they come in nice boxes. NICK WALKER:  You can geek out. BILL YATES:  Yeah, we get geeked out.  We think, this is the coolest thing ever.  This is going to change how I do my job and make my life that much better.  And, dang, I just like every feature in it.  I’m going to go deep and figure all this stuff out.  And we lose, to Andy’s point, we lose the big picture.  What are we doing?  How much time am I spending on the tool, just for the sake of me enjoying the tool?  Or is the tool really – am I serving the tool, or is the tool serving me? ANDY CROWE:  Mm-hmm. NICK WALKER:  So with that in mind, do you have any applications that are must-haves, some that you have to have, that you really can’t do without? BILL YATES:  Yeah.  We had fun reaching out to the community and asking other PMs, “What resonates with you?  If you were alone on an island, and you had a project you had to manage, what tool would you want to have on your last two hours of computer life, you know, before the battery dies?”  And so we got some nice feedback from people, from practitioners.