Although it’s Spring, the No Pants Festival has nothing to do with Spring Break and everything to do with an evolving management trend – the remote management of digital nomads. I call this type of workplace management “Radical Flexibility.”

The newest take on Radical Flexibility is ROWE (Results Only Work Environment).  The ideal ROWE workplace eliminates office norms: no set hours, no required meetings or office hours unless required to do your job.  The only measure of value is the results.

More accountability and less micromanaging are Project Success Method bywords, and some studies suggest positive impacts…but the underlying assumptions are less promising:

• you could get so much more work done if you didn’t have to bother with other people

• structure is a cage

A collaborative environment needs some structure – how can people work as a team without set hours? – and a meaningful team can’t be formed with people only known to each other as an email address.

The Project Success Method offers a better, hybrid alternative.  Our techniques encourage in-person meetings to strengthen mutual support, collaboration and commitment to projects – but individuals are free to decide whatever pace or solutions work best. The Method has worked for small new product launches and large-scale, mission critical, time-sensitive, cross functional projects across an entire enterprise – while combining accountability and freedom for individuals, teams and managers.

Now that’s what I call Radical.  But no, it’s not pants optional.

A survey of 32,000 employees revealed that people who met with their managers up to six hours a week were more inspired, engaged and innovative at work. That confirms PSI’s preference for in-person, biweekly team status meetings to shift the Worry Curve.

We know it’s difficult to make time, coordinate schedules, and reserve the room. However, consider the pitfalls of relying solely on electronic status reports – for project managers and teams:

• It encourages procrastination:  Emailed status reports and updates sit in an inbox with other email – easy to overlook or put off. It doesn’t command the attention a meeting would.

• It discourages group problem solving:  Electronic reporting deprives the project of the collective insight and support of the entire team when problems arise.

• It hinders accountability: The biggest problem electronic reporting creates is enabling team members to avoid public accountability for their tasks by hiding behind email.

In-person meetings create team commitment to the project, to each other and to their own roles in the project, while project managers find it easier to monitor progress, see deviations from the plan and tap the insights of the whole group to find solutions.  Being in a room together drives accountability, results, and a sense of community.

It’s a lot better than hiding behind an email.

Andy Rubin, the creator of Android, is launching an incubator for innovators…and it reminds me of a familiar mindset.

His Playground Global LLC will provide support and advice to tech startups making devices for consumers or businesses. This “studio” lets inventors do the fun stuff (creating new products). Playground handles the operations – the scut work, so to speak.

I think “scut work” needs an image overhaul. It’s how Things Get Done. Improving how Things Get Done is a worthwhile investment – but you wouldn’t know from some responses project managers tell me they get when pitching Project Success Method training to senior management:

“It’s just more overhead”

“We bought software to handle that”

“How much can anyone learn in just two days?”

“It’s micromanagement”

It’s like the joke about making politics and making sausage – but it’s the “scut work” that takes a new product from a blank screen to a sales floor. Improving that process is a worthwhile investment that’s paid off for our clients in time and money again and again – and saved weeks of panic-driven overtime by team members caught in a time crunch.

Suppose your car needs an oil change. You visit two garages on Monday looking for estimates. Garage One quotes $50; Garage Two quotes $50. Both say it takes two hours.

You leave your car at Garage One, go to a movie, and return two hours later to pay and drive away. Three months later you try Garage Two. You return from the movie. There’s an oil pan under your car. The mechanic is working the register.

“I need my car,” you say.

“It took an hour to prep and drain the oil,” the mechanic says as he rings up someone. “Now I’m on the register for the rest of the week. I’m not sure when I’ll get to the remaining hour.”

No one would accept this scheduling for a car. Why accept it in a project?

Relying on resource hours over task duration is one of my project management pet peeves. Methodologies that rely solely on resource hours don’t adequately predict when things will actually get done.

Managers and teams that go through our training get practical experience in the kind of scheduling that tells them when they can take the next step and when the job will be done – ahead of schedule, too. In project management, as in life, knowing how long a task takes – even a simple oil change – is insufficient. You need to know when you can drive your car.   It’s the only way to get anywhere, on the road or in your career.

“Paralysis by Analysis,” “Information Overload,” “TMI.”

If the key to a successful project is controlling time, one timewaster to eliminate is over-reporting. Some managers spend too much time tracking too many activities at too low a level of detail.

Luckily, reporting doesn’t have to be like doing your taxes, if you have some guidelines on how much detail is enough:

Each activity should produce a deliverable or change in product status with just enough information to indicate a change in status.

• Subdivide long-term activities into tasks of about a month, so you can track and monitor progress reliably.
• As a rule of thumb, a good level of detail is between three and fifteen working days.

Of course, some large, complex projects – just like large, complex tax returns – need some outside help. Our hands-on course in Control Methods & Practices with Microsoft Project streamlines controlling the performance of projects characterized by complexity and dynamic change.

A concise reporting strategy lets everyone spend their time on the project and not on reporting. Whoever said “the Devil is in the details” was likely a project manager.

There are ‘teachable moments” but April presents a teachable month. Tax time makes project managers of everyone who files a return.

Most people procrastinate, then scramble for records and spend days with an accountant or tax software. As April 15 approaches, they cross their fingers, file, and hope. They prove PSI’s philosophy: of the three measures of project success – time, budget and quality – the key element to manage properly is time.

 Busy managers have two common solutions, both wrong:

-Count backwards from the deadline

-Let the software handle it

 Both solutions are cages, not structures. Scheduling backwards is inflexible, unrealistic, and suppresses team commitment…and despite “time management software” and its 320 million Google hits, software alone is not the answer – people are.

We developed an add-in for Microsoft Project that puts people in control of their schedules. Our Project Success Toolkit lets users revise an activity’s duration without impacting resource assignments, and vice versa. This creates a more stable schedule because task duration, resource assignments and status do not change without user input.

We can’t help with IRS schedules, but we can train staff on the Project Success Method in just two day’s time – three with the Project Success Toolkit program. That’s a schedule any project manager could appreciate.

Apple is grabbing headlines by announcing an Apple Online TV service this year. Some predict more disruptions ahead as midmarket companies, unhindered by big-company infrastructure, launch new strategic initiatives.

Such uncharted territory makes it likely that the wrong kind of disruption will occur: the unknown or unanticipated issues that delays or derails projects, as one PSI client recognized. He spearheaded a complete re-engineering of a core function of a finance powerhouse, with a tight deadline and hundreds of staff…with “…no time for training, and we needed more than just a review of techniques.”

“The Project Success MethodÒ was simple to learn with a relatively modest investment of time and money,” he said of the two-day session. PSI’s decisive factor was “A powerful methodology…that provides a set of reliable and proven problem-solving methods…. There will be unknowns as you process through a project. You have to be equipped with methods to identify them early and plan new solutions as needed.”

With PSI’s training, his team was able to bring a $100 milllion project to a successful conclusion right on schedule. That’s what I call the right kind of disruption.

During PSI training, there’s one moment when attendees sit up straight and their eyes widen. I can practically hear their hearts race. It’s when we first mention “accountability.”

Properly exercised, however, accountability can be liberating and empowering…and so much more.

This was demonstrated by a young man whose long-range project plan – a year in the making – was a viral hit.

He and his team were fully committed to the project and accountable to each other and to the project’s success. Moreover, he modeled an approach to scheduling project activity I describe in my book as “Try to be Normal.” He realized his effort would take place amid other activities. He didn’t make each step happen in the same place, same time or same way. Whether he did it while brushing his teeth or riding with friends, the priority was doing the activity and being committed to the process.   In fact, it added to his project’s charm and its successful conclusion.

We all knew that accountability was empowering – but who knew it could be romantic as well?

A key to project success is getting everyone on the same page, but is it the right page?

Over time, client prospects have described simple project management missteps with big consequences, such as important training sessions that had to be cancelled because no one had reserved the specially-equipped room.

In that case, their Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) had a common flaw. To save time, they broke tasks down by functional areas (engineering, marketing, production). That encouraged a “silo” approach to planning and executing the project…and there was no silo for “booking the room for training.”

In our materials and training, we stress the cross-functional nature of projects and offer guidelines on WBS categories (project deliverables vs. project phases), special WBS cases, and how to determine the appropriate level of detail and duration. (It’s less time than you’d think.)

Sometimes prospects share their concern that the Project Success Method ‘takes too much time.” If only I could put them in touch with the project manager who had to reschedule the trainer, contact the attendees to cancel their flights, and explain all the cancellation charges to management!