By Tammy Debord, MBA, PMP, PMI-ACP, CDAP, SAFe Agilist & Scrum Master, CSM
Luckily, this isn’t a trick question. Have you ever heard the phrase, “It’s more of an art than a science.”? This holds true for many different endeavors in life and business, including Project Management.
The Way we Approach Problems is Changing
As a Project Management Professional (PMP)® for over 12 years, here is what I’ve learned—think of it as two different buckets of knowledge.
Let’s call Bucket A: “The Science.” This may include:
- Project Management Certifications (PMP, CSM, SSM)
- Project Management Frameworks (PMI, SAFe, Disciplined Agile, FLEX)
- Project Management Process and Artifacts (Project Charters, Agile Release Trains, Six Sigma Flow Chart)
Bucket B: “The Art” includes things like:
- Building psychological safety
- Driving innovation
- Empowering self-organizing teams to deliver valuable solutions
While the science is absolutely needed, without the art, we have to ask: Would we still consider it a successful endeavor?
I have witnessed a shift from only defining success through costs, dates, and deliverables to instead broadening the definition to include delighting our customers, building a high-performing team culture, and criteria that includes more items from Bucket B.
Design Sprints to the Rescue
Intrigued by this shift and how it relates to my work as consultant, I recently signed up for a Masterclass by Jake Knapp called The Design Sprint.
Design Sprints, born out of Google Ventures, is now practiced across the globe as a proven method for problem-solving and launching innovative solutions.
A Design Sprint traditionally runs four to five full consecutive days with a set number of team members who are pulled together to focus on a core problem. The structure follows the path of Design Thinking, which includes: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test.
At its core, Design Thinking is user-centered and focuses on rapid learning based on human interactions driven through a tailored process that drives to solutions.
5 Design Sprint Tips
- Show, don’t tell. Facilitators encourage visuals like sketches, prototypes, and dot-voting over traditional meetings where participants typically just talk about ideas. Having a dialogue using an interactive medium helps to eliminate assumptions when people only describe what they mean.
- Put people first. People oftentimes drive your greatest outcomes or are your biggest barriers. Projects are not inanimate things to manage.
- Frame and re-frame. How you frame a problem allows you to find the right challenge to tackle. “How might we…?” problem statements allow participants to try many different lenses to a particular challenge.
- Embrace ambiguity. Sometimes situations won’t be clear and your cheese will be moved—when that happens, stay the course and push through with your team.
- Context matters. Whether you are in a new organization or another country, every ecosystem has their own culture, language, and norms to which you should recalibrate.
While I did earn a certification to add to my collection (think Bucket A: The Science), what I take with me is that the “art” of running a successful Design Sprint is the same “art” as running a successful project.
It takes a different part of the skills in your toolbox to master both—the best consultants I know have the best toolbox to pull from.
Put Your Skills into Action
A couple of ideas from the Masterclass that I have been able to use immediately in my current higher education consulting work are:
- Re-framing the problem
- Understanding context
For example, when developing an application, it is easy to believe the end goal is simply ‘completed functionality.’
By reframing the problem with the user in mind, i.e., “How might we ensure a student is able to combine and transfer their units online between campuses?”, we ensure that what is developed meets the needs of a solution beyond working code.
This could mean ensuring the underlying data needs to be revisited or that a mobile-first user experience better serves the population using the application.
By understanding context, we may discover we need to know more about the upstream or downstream applications that units are coming from or feed into so that the student has a tool that can meet their needs.
By reframing the problem and understanding context, we refocus using an empathetic lens through a technology solution.
These are just a few ways I’ve started using Design Sprint concepts in my work—do you use the Design Sprints or Design Thinking concepts? Let us know some success stories or problem areas—maybe we can help!
About the Author: Tammy Debord, MBA, PMP, PMI-ACP, CDAP, SAFe Agilist, SAFe Scrum Master, CSM started her career in gaming at Sony PlayStation and has worked in several fields including Solar, Higher Education, and Finance in Silicon Valley. Currently she is an Executive Consultant with KAI Partners, working with a public sector higher education client. While not collecting letters behind her name as part of her love of life-long learning, she enjoys watching boxing and following the Marvel Universe of films.
Great points Tammy!
Nice article. Very true that people are the key!
Nice one, Tammy
Many times leaders look at project management as a purely technical means to the end, versus this concept of design thinking that combines the science, art, context and people, to create a plan for completing a project. Seemingly, the design thinking approach can create psychological safety for teaming and a more palatable place to work, too.
P.S. Tammy, I very much appreciated this article. Great job!
Great job Tammy!