Project Management
The ordinary craft of getting defined work done — and the debts a body accumulates when it is skipped.
Its hygiene is a short list, and none of it is clever: know the goals above the piece you hold; know the sequence of milestones and the work each requires; set timeframes that are real; build a Work Breakdown Structure; write the plan; hold short, frequent check-ins to solve issues and iterate; retrospect at the midpoint and at the end. The list is not the point. The point is that a body which does none of it will discover each item the hard way, one crisis at a time.
It is load-bearing chiefly as the floor the rest of this domain stands on. Pull planning, The look-ahead and Networks of Commitments are what the craft becomes when the promises are made by the people doing the work rather than assigned by a manager; without the plain hygiene beneath them they have nothing to operate on. Project management debt names the accumulated cost of skipping it — work no one can size, dependencies nobody wrote down, decisions re-litigated because their reasons were never recorded — and like all debt it is paid with interest, usually by whoever arrives next.
How much is needed varies honestly with the body. Experienced, well-oiled teams need less of the apparatus; new, loosely-formed or mixed teams need more of it to avoid predictable failure. The closer to mastery, the more the form may be broken in order to do the wise right thing — and never before it can be held.
Also called: Project Management Hygiene · Project Management Debt Stands on: Work Breakdown Structure · The activity table · Everything Is A Project Opens onto: Pull planning · The look-ahead · Communication Debt · Retrospective · Issue In play: table · Home Sources: Project Management (wiki root page, marked Work In Progress; a pointer only) · Project Management Hygiene (wiki root page, a checklist) · 3.4 Project Management Foundations (Program Delivery Guide, fragments for synthesis) · The LIØNSBERG Lexicon (Work In Progress) §Tribe of Tribes — lionsberg.wiki page name: Project Management Hygiene Open: Project Management Debt is named in the Lexicon with no page of its own.