Pondering both Rob and Rolf’s comments on my suggestion that time management is more important than project management for most non-profit organizations, I was left thinking about the larger issue that each of our perspectives points too… Once distilled down to its essence, my hypothesis is that many people don’t have an accurate picture of their available time.

Rob believes that what I call “traditional” project management is what he would call bad project management, meaning that:

If the project management processes being used on your project are too heavy-weight or inappropriately top-down, they are not being applied correctly.

However, I still feel that there’s a missing piece here. My original point is: it’s individuals who have to complete the tasks assigned to them, and if those individuals aren’t able to manage their time effectively, then project success (as defined by being on time, on budget, etc.) will remain ellusive.

Rolf goes on to highlight a few of the other challenges for non-profit staff when they become part of a project team, which are basically:

• the ability to make reasonably accurate estimates for tasks.
• the ability to communicate about not meeting deadlines or expectations

And he finishes his thoughts with the question:

If it weren’t for the last minute, nothing ever would get done. Should we focus on managing that minute?

I feel that Rolf’s observations probably come closest to what I’ve experienced over the last few years, which all leads in quite nicely to an exploration of this hypothesis that many people don’t have an accurate picture of their avaiable time.

Let’s conduct a quick survey here: when you think about your work week, how many hours do you plan to have available for work-related tasks?

Well, my experience is that if a person works for an employer, they typically will respond between 35 and 40 hours. If they’re self-employed (like me) they’ll often also respond 35 - 40 hours (or, in both cases, if they’re overworked they’ll say 50 or 60!).

Here’s the crux of the issue: in my personal practice — thanks to my time management fanaticism — I have deduced that I have just 24 available, and potentially billable, hours in a work week.

If I could impart just one thing to any new entrepreneur or person starting out on their own, it would be to recognize how little time there is available in a one week period. Recognizing this early would probably help people avoid burn out, price their time more accurately, improve the quality of their work, and ultimately increase client satisfaction.

In his books on time management, David Allen talks about keeping track of “open loops,” which are commitments that have been made toward doing something. We make these all the time without realizing it and, more importantly, without tracking it. Though David’s recommendations are a good first step toward tracking these commitments, I don’t feel they go far enough toward recognizing just how sparse and valuable a person’s time really is. Ultimately, to manage time and projects effectively: you — and each member of your team — need an accurate picture of what time is available and what time comitements have already been made.

So, without getting into the differences between people who are employed in the traditional sense and those who are self-employed, let me illustrate the issue from my own experiences:

• I invest between 60 and 90 minutes each morning responding to the previous day’s e-mail (and then I attempt to not look at it again);
• I invest the equivalent of one day a week on things that I can’t bill for (follow-ups, proposals, accounting, etc.);
• I try to take enough breaks during a day to ensure that I’m focused and present with my clients or their projects;
• I try to get home for dinner with my partner Melanie, and I try to not work again until the next day.

All of this means that I find myself with — if I’m lucky — just 6 hours of available time in a day to work with; and, usually, it’s less due to phone calls, interruptions, or just good ‘ol unproductive spells. It also means that I only have four days in a week for billable projects. So, now we’re down to that 24 hours I mentioned. Here’s where it gets really fun. I also commit 25% of my remaining time to pro-bono or personal projects that will hopefully have long-term impacts (but don’t pay the bills). That leaves me with just three days — just 18 hours (tops!) — in a week to “Get things done.”

Now, after many years of working for myself and managing my own time, I consider myself a decent time manager. However, it has taken me a long time to distill down these day-to-day experiences into a system that recognizes how little time I really have. And, when I check-in with friends, colleagues, and clients about this reality, I almost always find that they don’t have a good picture of how little time that they really have in a week. So, that’s why I believe that many people don’t have an accurate picture of their available time, which can lead to folks being:

• Overworked: working 10 or more hours a day, six days a week;
• Uneven: relaxed and chatty one week, AWOL the next;
• Unresponsive: just plain unavailable, taking weeks to respond to an e-mail;
• Unreliable: often dropping the ball, missing the boat, or just not coming through;
• Unexpected: constantly surprised when they’ve run out of time or didn’t see something critical coming down the pipe.

It is my experience that this applies equally to people working in employed situations. I’m not sure if there any studies in this area, but I have often heard colleagues who are managing projects at larger organizations complain about the small number of productive hours in a day that they can count on from their team.

So, my question (to Rob and Rolf and you) is: if people don’t have accurate pictures of their availalbe time, how can they make good decisions about how to use it, or how to communicate about it? Or, in project planning, how can they provide you with a realistic picture of how long a task will take to complete?

I think that helping people get a grasp on their available time is the first step. Then helping them track and manage it is the next.

Once that foundation is set, we can move on to managing projects.

This will most certainly be the first in a long line of posts documenting my observations of life inside many non-profit organizations I’ve connected with. And a discussion around some of the commonly held views of what they struggle with, and what the best approaches are to helping voluntary organizations be more effective are.

One of the commonly held assumptions that I struggle with most is the notion that non-profits are inherently inefficient or poorly managed. My personal experiences lead me to believe that this rarely the case – or certainly no more the case in non-profits than in any other form of organization. And, quite often, I’ve seen innovation coming from community-based organizations being adopted and applied elsewhere.

However, one specific example of where I’ve heard and felt the “inefficient non-profits” argument being applied is toward their ability to manage projects. More and more, community-based organizations in Canada are being asked to deliver projects. Most often, this is due to funding restrictions or funding programs that don’t cover the costs of operation directly. However, some folks argue that many or most non-profits are not properly equipped for the shift from an operations-based model to a project-based one.

One good friend – a dedicated and experienced Project Management Professional (a certification achieved through the Canadian Project Management Institute) – has dedicated his work to supporting non-profits in becoming better project managers and delivering more efficient results through traditional project management. His workshops are excellent and his teachings are concise, well delivered, and always well received.

But my question is: how many non-profits are currently in a position to put traditional, top-down, project management processes into practice?

All arguments about the need for specialized training, continuous improvement strategies, and peer support aside, here is why I feel that traditional project management is not a good fit with many non-profit organizations:

• It’s generally accepted that for projects to be successful, they should be delivered on time, within budget, and within the defined scope;
• In my experience, projects are usually comprised of a number of tasks;
• Traditional project management involves assigning tasks to people;
• This implies that people have to be able to complete the tasks they are assigned for projects to be successful;
• And this also implies that task completion is just as important to a project’s success as the management process;
• Therefore, a person’s ability to successfully complete the tasks they are assigned is just as important as an organization’s ability to manage projects.

And that is the crux of my argument. In most non-profit organizations – where staff are often overextended, part time, or ill-prepared for requirements of project-based work – how can the command-and-control (or monitoring and control as the PMI likes to call it) systems be the most effective? Not wanting to digress into a long exploration of why people that work at non-profits might not be in it for the money – or how corporate ship-jumpers that landed there may be tired of the corporate way of doing things (and the motivational assumptions therein) – I’ll just point out that I feel that many project management methodologies often fall down at the point where real people need to complete real work.

At the end of the day: if a person is not able to effectively complete the tasks they are assigned – because they’re too busy, too tired, too distracted, or don’t have the tools to make effective decisions about what tasks to complete when – then project success as we have defined it will remain illusive.

So, if all that is true, what does it mean for non-profit staff to be successful at completing tasks they are assigned?

• Well, as we all know, tasks require time to complete;
• They also require some level of skill and attention;
• So, assuming that the person that has been assigned a task (or several of them, from several different projects) has enough skill to complete the task… then time and attention are all that is required.
• However, as a rule, we can’t give people more time than they have;
• This leads me to believe that we need to help people focus their attention on the right tasks, at the right time, and in the right priority to be effective project-based workers;
• Therefore, in the non-profit context—where resources are short, budgets are limited, and staff are overcommitted—I feel that time management is critically important to project success.

And, ultimately (and this is where my PMP friend will debate me to the death) I feel the time management training is more important than project management training for most non-profits and their staff.

Let the extended debate begin.