You might have heard of “agile project management” before. It has spawned an entire industry of coaches and consultants. There are a lot of different flavors of “agile.” We would rather not use “agile” to describe our project management philosophy. It has a lot of baggage, some good and some not-so-good. Instead, we are calling it “flexible project management” to emphasize our goal of maintaining as much flexibility as possible. Flexibility lets us meet people where they are rather than requiring them to change who they are. Flexibility lets us be as empathetic as possible while still achieving our goals. Rather than relying on command-and-control, sometimes referred to as “C2,” we rely on discovery and discussion.
Flexible project management involves negotiating the project’s work from start to finish while staying open to change. That means being patient, delaying decisions until you have to make them, and gathering as much information as you can along the way. When it’s time to act, you work with the information you have, not the information you wish you had, while keeping other options in mind in case your first plan doesn’t work out. The flexible project manager keeps adapting as the project changes. Sometimes that means going further than negotiating within the rules, changing the rules of the game itself to help the project succeed.
We don’t need flexible project management for everything. If we know exactly what to do, and we have the time and money to do it, we just do it. But sometimes the questions aren’t all answered yet, or we don’t have all the time and money we need, or we’re facing a “garden of forking paths” with more than one reasonable way forward. In those cases, flexible methods help us stay focused on the things most likely to bring success: creating stepping stones to our goals (Lesson 3), understanding our audience’s needs (Lesson 4), finding the core value of our project (Lesson 5), breaking tasks down into smaller, manageable chunks and estimating the time they might take (Lesson 6), prioritizing them (Lesson 7), and scheduling them (Lesson 8). Each of these is valuable on its own. Combined into a single workflow, they become powerful enough to reshape any project.
We bookend Lessons 3-8 with two other lessons. Lesson 2 explores our experience, examining what worked well and what didn’t. It also looks at how funder and grant reporting requirements can push a team toward over-planning, and how to stay flexible while still meeting those requirements. Lesson 9, the final lesson, compares two well-known approaches, Scrum and Kanban, then guides you in creating your own approach to flexible project management, tailored to your strengths and your team’s.
