The Bear and Friends have a way to speak truth. Just before heading to the doctor this morning, my wife put on The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh for our son. It’s been years since I’ve seen this, and my ear caught something of it while it played in the background. Pooh has eaten too much hunny and is stuck in Rabbit’s front door. Owl comes by to try and solve the problem. Does any of this sound familiar to you as you’ve seen other IT folks talk to business people about how to solve their problems:
| [Owl] |
You, sir, are stuck. A wedged bear in a great tightness. In a word, irremovable. Now obviously this situation calls for an expert. |
| [Gopher] |
Somebody call for excavation expert? I’m not in the book, but I’m at your service. Gopher’s the name. Here’s my card. What’s your problem? |
| [Owl] |
Yes, yes, yes. It seems the entrance to Rabbit’s domicile is impassable. To be exact, plugged. |
| [Gopher] |
And you want me to dig it out? |
| [Owl] |
Precisely. I say, it’s over here my good fellow. |
| [Gopher] |
Fist thing to be done is get rid of that bear. He’s gumming up the whole project. |
| [Owl] |
Dash it all, he is the project. |
| [Gopher] |
Umm… Hard digging, might hit bedrock, danger can happen, risky. Needs planks for bracing. Big job, take two, three days. |
| [Pooh] |
Three days? What about lunches? |
| [Gopher] |
No problem, I always go home for lunch. Oh, this will run into money. |
| [Owl] |
I say, how much |
| [Gopher] |
Er, do the job for hourly wage, plus cover material plus overtime plus 10 percent. |
| [Owl] |
And your estimate? |
| [Gopher] |
N’. N’. Can’t give you an estimate, too risky. |
| [Owl] |
Blast it all. |
| [Gopher] |
Good idea! Will dynamite, save time. |
| [Owl] |
What’s the charge? |
| [Gopher] |
The charge? Oh, about seven sticks of dynamite. |
| [Owl] |
Oh no no no, the cost, the charge in money? |
| [Gopher] |
No charge account, I work strictly cash. |
| [Owl] |
Obviously, but I should think… |
| [Gopher] |
Well I can’t stand around lollygagging all day, I’ve got a tight schedule…Think it over. Let me know. You’ve got my card. I’m not in the book, you know. |
| [Owl] |
Oh dash it all, he’s gone. |
I laughed at how little things some things have changed since the Disney writers took liberties with the Pooh stories and created this funny dialogue.
I’ve been a fan of David Allen’s GTD book
and Merlin Mann’s 43folders site for a long time. I go through waves of dedicated times and waves of lax times. Inspired a few weeks ago by Merlin’s recent Google talk, I tackled my home inbox and won:
Now I just need to do something about my work inbox (hundreds of emails in there)… 
Jim Shore’s recently made some observations about projects and products, James Shore: Successful Software.
Rather than thinking in terms of projects, I’ve come to prefer thinking about products and releases. Rather than talking about the project I’m working on and the tasks it involves, I’ll talk about the product and how it’s valuable. Rather than talking about deadlines, I’ll talk about releases.
I doubt companies will ever stop using the word “project”. I’ll play along. But when somebody says “project” and “deadline”, I’ll think “product” and “release”.
I like what he has to say about the lifecycle of software products: the initial release is often the start of the path rather than the end. I take a slightly different view than Jim on the choice of vocabulary (though I am tainted by ). My team works on a particular product. We release every two weeks. My business users, however, view large institutional changes as projects. For example, we’ve spent much of the last year working to bring about a big change in how information flows through the business. We’ve released useful pieces at least every 4 weeks. We released the bulk of the work months ago, and the business has been tweaking pieces of it since then.
The overall project is done. Another project iteration has begun. We’ve started and completed dozens of small projects during that time, and a few medium sized ones as well. All of these are improvements to the same product, and delivered using our release cycle.
Another influence in my use of the term project is the work of David Allen. His definition of a project (from Getting Things Done) is anything that takes two or more steps to complete. Using that definition, just about anything from a bug fix through a multi-year improvement to a product is deemed a project.
For working with others, I find that the business definition of project meets what most people expect and I find I can apply it well to my product and make progress toward the project through releases. For organizing my personal work, the GTD concept of project is flexible enough to handle the various things that come up.
