Just-In-Time Project Management: A Digital-First Framework for Modern Projects

Technology has transformed every aspect of business, from the tools we use to communicate and collaborate, to how products and services are built and delivered, to how we conceive of organizations and communities.

But it hasn’t yet transformed the heart of how we manage and execute work – project management (PM).

A new paradigm for project management in the digital age has a few requirements:

• Digital-native, not only allowing but assuming that most work will be completed using digital technology and online
• Explicitly enable knowledge workers, who are no longer an exotic curiosity, but the dominant economic force in the world
• Thrive in the face of uncertainty and change, not only surviving but excelling in the face of the VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) we find ourselves working in every day
• Accommodate any team or organizational structure, adding value regardless of whether a project is being completed by a single freelancer, a team of contractors, across organizational boundaries, or by traditional employees
• Leverage emerging digital technologies, remaining open to and expecting new capabilities to become available regularly
• Operate through and within networks, taking advantage of existing platforms and ecosystems to learn and move faster
• Integrate deeply with learning, making continuous improvement synonymous with work itself
• Assume remote collaborators, capitalizing on the advantages of distributed teams while neutralizing their disadvantages
• Maximize return-on-attention, explicitly recognizing that attention is our most valuable resource

These are the requirements I’m committed to fulfilling over the course of this series. Let’s begin by defining the key metric of Just-In-Time Project Management (JITPM): Return-on-Attention.

THE FALL OF RETURN-ON-INVESTMENT

By the 1950s, American automaker General Motors had become the largest company in the world¹. Its methods were studied and copied by industrial corporations around the world, becoming the first widespread use of “systematic management.”

Of all the new practices that GM developed, the most influential has been Return-on-Investment (abbreviated as ROI).

The logic is straightforward: any given project has a required input (or investment), and an expected output (a return). We’ve all heard that “It takes money to make money.” By dividing the return by the investment, we get Return-on-Investment, a very simple metric that tells us “what came out” in terms of “what went in”:

If I invest $10,000 into a project and it returns $11,000, that project had an ROI (Return-on-Investment) of 10% (the profit of $1,000 divided by the original investment of $10,000). It doesn’t matter how big or small a project is, how short or long it takes, or how it gets paid back. As long as it can be boiled down to inputs and outputs, we can arrive at a single number called ROI.