Management By Lists

Context

Project management, team management

Problem

Manager needs to pay attention to all aspects of the team's activities and make decisions about tasks, assignments, and actions.

Forces

Formal management/tracking methods and tools (MicrosoftProject, GanttCharts?, PertCharts?) are seen as too costly, too time-consuming, too cryptic, or too hard to learn.
Manager has responsibilities other than managing, and wants to minimize management effort without overlooking/forgetting anything.
Manager wants to share as much information as possible with team members and stakeholders.
Desire for flexible response to change discourages detailed step-by-step planning of every activity.

Solution

Create a bunch of written lists of things to keep track of. Periodically, run down each list item by item and determine whether any action is required for each item. Add/remove/update items as needed.

Keeping a regular schedule of list review will reduce the amount of task-switching that a busy manager must do. Different lists need different review periods (for example, current team-member tasks will change more frequently than a list of deadlines).

Lists should include only important information, and not include any unimportant information. The goal is to use the lists as much as possible as automated tools, allowing the manager to quickly scan them, quickly make any necessary decisions, and then forget about them until the next review time. Whenever something comes up while one is working on another task, add it to a list and then forget about it until later.

Lists can be kept on paper, on index cards, in text files, in databases, in wiki pages, in PDA, or in any other convenient medium. Format of lists varies by content type and by the organizational style of the manager.

Publishing the lists, either in electronic form or just by posting them on a wall somewhere, helps to keep others aware of overall status. It is easy to delegate tasks by simply handing someone a list. The lists can be used as agenda items in meetings.

Examples of useful lists:

Deadlines
Current deliverables
Current tasks of team members
TopTenRisks
Critical bugs
Contact lists (names, phone numbers, e-mail, addresses) for team members, customers, suppliers, etc.
Hardware and software items to procure
Things to do today, things to do this week, things to do this month
Travel itineraries for all team members

Resulting Context

Easier to multi-task, by keeping information on paper rather than keeping it all in one's head all the time.
Informal nature of lists may require additional work to update "official" formal plans or status reports.

Beware of the related AntiPattern, MismanagementByLists?: Inexperienced managers may get the impression that reviewing the lists is the only thing they need to do, and neglect to talk to people, find out what's really going on in the project.

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MS Project is just a special case of management by lists. Not as good as XP, better than nothing. XP is also management by lists (UserStories).