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.

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.

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.

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?