The Ball
honor demands it
Several years ago I had an interview where they asked me how I manage projects. I blathered for a few minutes about sprints, asana boards, and stakeholder management. The interviewer nodded along, we smoothly moved to the next question, and we were both secretly relieved to have avoided the potentially uncomfortable situation where I said something substantive.
If I was asked this same question now, I would not discuss timelines or software tools. I would, calmly and cooly, stand up, hold the sides of the table with an iron grip, lean forward and with a dead stare and a steady voice tell them “it’s about keeping the ball moving forward”.
This old memory has been dredged up for reintegration as I recently received a compliment on how I managed a project. This was funny to me as much of the management was ad-hoc, duct tape-esque, and involved me pinging people at all hours.
But I think I did something better than I have in most previous projects I’ve led - I embodied a zealous, near religious focus on keeping the ball moving forward.
The ball is the whole reason you’re there. The ball is the heart of the project. The core deliverable. The payload. It’s why you joined the Organization, why the Organization was formed in the first place.
And you know in your bones that if the ball gets over the goal line, you get money, status, beautiful (wo)men, and the counterfactual impact which will guarantee you a place in heaven.
If it doesn’t get over the line, honor dictates that you fall on your sword.
I believe that the ball can only ever be in one of three states:
It can be moving forward.
It can be standing still.
It can be dropped.
Project management is doing everything possible so that the ball is always in the moving forward state.
You cannot be sure that the Ball is moving forward just because a Task in a Dashboard is marked as in-progress or complete (every dashboard is built on a pillar of lies). You only know it’s moving forward when your paranoid anxiety subsides for a moment, and, if interrogated, you can write down from memory everyone’s current tasks - or, less likely, remember the half dozen docs that you had written these down previously.
The PM’s responsibility is to keep an eye on the player(s) with the ball, finding ways to unblock them, and being mindful of handoffs. Balls tend to be dropped when there are handoffs.
It’s possible the Ball is failing to move forward because people are busy, but often it’s due to miscommunication, hesitation, and unclear decision rights. The Ball is shrouded in the fog of war.
It’s unclear who has the knowledge or authority to make a decision.
The collective orientation to a problem is messed up in some way (maybe because of the above, maybe lack of resources or shared time)
Individual contributors lack the expertise or support or motivation necessary to execute well, and so action is taking a while.
The low level agony fun of project management is trying to identify where that FUD is, and reduce it, doing this as aggressively as possible, but not so aggressive you’re killed in a fake office accident.
Most of the time we’re too reluctant to have social conflict about the Ball, which is why projects languish and team members are unclear on what to do next.
All Ball games are timed affairs. It’s a project and not a process, which means you’re hitting deadlines, which is how you keep score. The level of energy and attention and teaminess of a project will go up and down over time, as will your own.
In my experience most projects start out with high emotions, and then proceed through commitment and resolve towards a gritty revenge arc against those people (aka your past self) who committed you to the endeavor in the first place.
Is there a gentler, less bushido way to move the Ball forward? Perhaps, but I find it hard to trust a Project Manager who does not feel the tug of honor.