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Comment by jdlyga | Hacker News Reader

At this point, what project management technique actually is working well?

In my experience, but I know I am unconventional, half-organized chaos. You do need motivated, good people for that so. The chaos bit is those people figurong out their stuff themselves, while the organized bit is szrict following up on deliverables, relevant deadlines, flexibility on not-so-relevant ones and, this is crucial, step in in to provide guidance, support decision maling and coordination between peoole and teams. If the latter means setting up a dozen 30 minute meetings between two people, the be it.

Only gets you so far so. And needs everyone being aware of customer needs and requirements.

"chaos" is what relatively unproductive people, or people-at-arms-length call it. "Doing the job" is another term.

I've had to remind people several times not to apologise for "causing chaos" when the outcome of this supposed chaos is that the project was successful. The purpose of your job is success, not the perception of others that their charts lacked forewarning of all the unknowables needed to successful execute anything.

Chaos in many cases is just what you call the experience of looking at a chart, or a model of any kind, when you're familiar with the reality it's supposed to depict

This resonates so much with my experience.

I think it was Jim Collins in Good to Great starting with the idea that it's super important to "get the right people on the bus...and the wrong people off the bus". Which he expanded to the idea that motivated, skillful people don't actually need that much management, and that it is the mediocre and worse performers that do.

One caviat I'd like to add: what the right and wrong people are depends a lot on the bus, the destination and the driver. Otherwise, I fully agree!

I think it's not so much the individual management technique that is the problem, it's the design of our organisations. SAFe, Lean, etc. are half processes and half organization design, but are generally really shoddy on the second part, and mostly shoddy on the first part.

Team topologies as a way to design your organization is a good start, TPS for processes, but with really taking to heart the kaizen and autonomation parts. And things that maximise autonomy and facilitate communication.

It doesn't matter what technique you use if you use it poorly.

OKRs, and similar methods, are all doing the same thing. Define what you want to do and how you will measure it. The effort companies put into changing to the latest flavor of the week is mostly a waste of time. It makes upper management feel important, but creates chaos in the organization and a lot of lost time to process change, all to define what they had already defined, just with a new acronym.

Project management is about organising people. And people are hard to organise.

So they all work as well as they can depending on what your situation and goals are.

Certainly not SAFe, despite what the project management department will tell you.

I had a PM pull up the visual to explain SAFe to me. I just started laughing and said, “no”.

* providing context for why work is done and what the outcome should be

* projects with fixed time and variable scope, look at Shape Up by Basecamp for one example, or MoSCoW method for a simpler model

* giving team the ownership and autonomy

Good team culture, that is the only thing that really works.

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