Every once in a while, someone in one of my classes asks, Aren’t there any tools for Legal Project Management?

(“Every once in a while” means every other session or thereabouts. It’s a common question.)

I answer this in three ways that I’ll share here.

“Tools” Does Not Mean Technology

First, “technology” is not a synonym for “tools.” It is at best one set of tools among many. To be specific, it is a minor set.

You can manage legal projects perfectly well without technology, and certainly without purpose-built “project management” technology. Lawyers Abe Lincoln and Clarence Darrow, for example, managed some highly successful projects using nothing more technological than pen and paper.

The converse is not true. You can have the world’s best technology-based tools and manage a project straight into the ground. I’ve seen that happen far too often. Effective Legal Project Management requires knowledge, common sense, leadership, people management, and communication as a baseline; fall short in one of these areas, and technology won’t rescue you.

The toolbox I recommend in my classes rarely includes technology beyond what’s already on your computer. Communication is a tool. Knowledge – of the client’s business and of project and people management techniques, among other areas – is a tool. Knowledge of your own strengths and weaknesses is a tool, a very powerful one.

Tools such as these are the ones that matter.

Build on these strengths, and then it’s time to think about other, technology-based tools that might augment your capabilities.

Project-Management-Specific Technology Tools

So let’s say you’ve learned to think like a project manager. Are there project-management tools that can help now?

As the lawyer said, “It depends.” (That was the answer on an all-lawyer episode of Jeopardy. Alex Trebek would have accepted any question as correct. Okay, I made that up. I think.)

There are some powerful tools that can offer a bit of assistance, such as Microsoft Project. The Gantt Chart aspects that people associate with Project aren’t terribly useful outside of a few specific types of matters, but the resource-calculation and task-list-with-rollup features of the left hand side of the default screen can be quite useful. However, it takes significant time and effort to master a tool this complex; it’s not clear that this is the best use of your time unless you’re highly comfortable with technology and don’t get caught up in technology-for-technology’s sake.

There are some simpler tools that address particular pieces of the Legal Project Management puzzle. One of those is OnIt, a cloud-based service that can help you track tasks, assignments, and budgetary items. It won’t manage the project for you; retain realistic expectations. Still, if its way of task management conforms to the way you work, it might be worth checking out.

The Legal OnRamp (the Secure OnRamp, the paid version) also offers some project management related technology, especially in terms of secure shared workspace in the cloud. It’s particularly valuable if you don’t use something like SharePoint already or if members of a multi-firm or joint firm/company team don’t have access to a single SharePoint site. It offers some intriguing capabilities beyond SharePoint as well, since it’s focused on legal work where SharePoint is a general-purpose tool.

Technology Tools You Already Have

The most effective and important technology tools are tools you already have.

They’re the components of Microsoft Office, particularly Word, Outlook, Excel, and OneNote. (If you’re not a Microsoft Office user, the equivalents you’re using in its place will work equally well, with the substitution of EverNote for OneNote.)

Outlook: I encourage project managers to make full use of two calendar features.

First, set up a project account with a separate calendar, and share that calendar with the team. It’s an easy place to note deadlines, meetings, assignments, etc. (Set the default reminder to None.) Team members can go to Open Calendar and open this account calendar.

There are various Microsoft and third-party add-ins that allow you to share calendars across the Internet, but I have no sense of how secure they are or whether some judge might deem that they break confidentiality or privilege boundaries.

Second, share out your own calendar among the project team. You can always mark some events private. However, sharing your calendar makes it easy for the team to understand what the project leader is doing… and to locate you if they need you for an urgent and important project issue.

My book The Off Switch contains other suggestions for making better use of email in general.

Word: It’s easy to turn a simple task list into a project schedule. If you’re comfortable with Word but not comfortable with other tools, then by all means do this in Word – and share it with the team! Set it up as a table for easy editing. Hint: once you have the table set up, put the cursor in the table, go to the Table Tools Layout tab, and select Repeat Header Rows. Each new page will show the table header, a boon when task lists start to span multiple pages.

Excel: Raise your hand if you went to law school to study math. Hmmm. No wonder Excel doesn’t have much of a following among lawyers.

That said, it works well for task lists, especially if you also track the time spent on each task. Few timekeeping systems allow you to retrieve timekeeping data in a way that maps to project tasks so that you can use the data to get better at estimating similar tasks in the future.

It’s also a good way to track risk exposure. (See my book Legal Project Management.)

OneNote is the unknown gem of Microsoft Office. For one thing, It’s easy to share pages on the fly, and you can “whiteboard” easily with them.

I use it to track almost all of the aspects of projects because of its flexibility, the sharing feature, and most of all because it gives me one single place to track and note everything, project related or not. There’s even a version for the iPad, which can help make the Apple tablet an even more powerful adjunct for the work of Legal Project Management.

The Number One Project Management Tool

Remember, there’s one Legal Project Management tool that stands above all the rest.

Without it, all the other tools combined won’t make you a successful project manager.

You have that tool in your toolbox. You’ve been using it for years. You’ve perforce gotten very good it with to attain the position you now have.

(If you’re unclear which tool I’m talking about, you’ll spot it next time you look in a mirror.)

Everyone is playing Words With Friends on their smartphones these days.

When even my 11-year old son and my 16-year-old daughter (and my no-way-will-I-reveal-her-age wife) became addicted, I thought it time to look into the phenomenon – that, and the fact that my son whispered to his Scrabble-loving father that he needed help in a game against his mom.

Let me lay out a fact pattern:

1. Words With Friends is similar to Scrabble – seven tiles at a time, points assigned to letters in inverse relation to their frequency in English words, a board with double- and triple-letter and double- and (rare) triple-word scores, etc.
2. The board is laid out slightly differently and the letter point values are just different enough to make it hard for Scrabble to prove copyright violation.
3. You can play it on your smartphone, your computer, even a wireless-connected iPod.
4. It’s heavily connected with social networking, e.g., with strong integration with Facebook. Thus it “spreads virally,” a fancy way of saying players can easily invite others to a game. You can also “chat” with (send messages to) your opponent during a game.
5. Four years ago, Hasbro, maker of Scrabble, sued the makers of the popular Facebook game Scrabulous because it was a direct knockoff of Scrabble – same board, same point counts, etc.
6. Three years ago, Hasbro dropped the suit. By that time, Scrabulous was in semi-limbo yet the Facebook version of Scrabble was unloved (and by most accounts awkward and slow).
7. Did I mention Words With Friends is similar to Scrabble?

To sum up, people love Scrabble and people love simple online games. There was a great Scrabble-like game on the web. Scrabble sued rather than find a way to coopt it (or buy it). Now there is another great Scrabble-like game on the web… but it’s not Scrabble (as in Scrabble™, the branded game), and it’s not by Hasbro.

It seems like a huge lost opportunity for Scrabble/Hasbro. And how long can it be before Words With Friends is available in a physical-world actual board game?

The Law-Practice Analogy

Here’s another fact pattern (or, to be honest, something of a conjecture pattern, since facts are hard to come by in this arena for various reasons):

1. Clients have requested their law practices, whether firm or in-house, to become more efficient with their limited dollars.
2. Some practices have responded well; others have made soothing noises but largely temporized. (South of the border we call it “punting the problem,” but then we think football should have one fewer player and one more down, so what do we know?)
3. The cost pressures aren’t receiving quite as much press as they used to. (Let’s say that pressures over the market as a whole are neither increasing nor decreasing, though there’s no easy way to quantify this question.)
4. If (when?) cost pressures increase again, the firms that have already figured out ways to be equally profitable at lower cost will have an advantage as first responders.

There are law practices today saying, “Maybe the economy is reviving, but for whatever reason we don’t think the pressure on prices (or internal costs) will continue.” They are acting as if they’ve beaten the squeeze and it’s only a matter of time before it’s back to business as usual.

Maybe they’re right. But….

Scrabble-maker Hasbro probably thought it had beaten the competition when it stopped the momentum of Scrabulous. What did they do then?

As far as I can tell, not much. They missed their user community’s real need. They focused on the competition rather than the need; with the competition in retreat, they thought life was good again.

They saw Scrabulous as identical to Scrabble. Why would people play the fake when the real game was available?

The game-play was identical, but the experience was not. Scrabulous was easy to set up. Connecting to play a friend was effortless. Scrabulous replicated the social Scrabble environment, friends talking about a variety of subjects while they played the game.

The game itself wasn’t the object of playing the game; social interaction was.

Eventually, a few smart people recognized that twist. They replicated and even enhanced the social aspect while retaining the gameplay, changing the form of the game just enough to deal with copyright issues.

So one more fact pattern, seen repeatedly in the business world:

1. A competitor dominating a market gets stale, failing to keep up with changing times.
2. A new product comes along. It’s not very good at first.
3. The dominator tries to put the competitor out of business rather than change its cash cow.
4. The new product works out some bugs and taps into user needs and desires.
5. The new product takes off, often by a different vendor than the company that made the first stab at it.
6. The former dominator plays catch-up, but is usually too late.

Note the parallel to the two previous lists. For lawyers, the “new product” isn’t a robo-lawyer or a pro se explosion (though online legal forms might be an example within this decade). Rather, the new product is efficiency.

Law practices that figure out how to deliver work more efficiently may well have increasing opportunities to upset the market, to take business from larger-but-slower firms, the “dominators.” For in-house work, the equation is a little different, but the idea is the same.

I’ve written previously (here, on my own site, and in my book Legal Project Management) that being efficient does not mean making less money or lower profits.

Scrabble Tournaments and Bet-the-Company Matters/Files

There are a handful of big-time Scrabble tournaments. For the time being, at least, those tournaments will be played with Scrabble boards and letter-counts. But they represent a tiny percentage of Scrabble and Scrabble-like games.

There are a handful of bet-the-company cases. For the time being, at least, those cases will continue to be served by high-end practices charging top dollar. But they represent a tiny percentage of legal work.

Most “Scrabble” games today are actually Words With Friends games. Every day that passes, true Scrabble represents an increasingly smaller segment of the games played.

Most legal work… well, we’re not quite there. Yet.

But increased efficiency will have a market breakthrough, if not this year, then soon.

Will you lead the charge? Or will you wait, hoping the world won’t actually change?

Meanwhile, anyone up for a game of Words With Friends?

Teaching a seminar not long ago, I commented that texting while driving was a clear example of the failure of multitasking. A very bright senior lawyer said, "But sometimes you have to." (Even her workaholic colleagues looked askance at that!)

No, you don't have to. Ever.

You know it's a bad idea, right?

It's easy to recognize in this example that a texting driver is dividing her attention, paying attention sometimes to the cars around her and attention at other times to her smartphone. Perhaps the text message does require only part of her attention (though even that's unclear, according to researchers).

However, when driving requires your attention, you must attend to it now, not when you happen to look up from your smartphone.

Partial attention on the road can kill you.

(Or me.)

Experienced drivers allow certain aspects of driving to become background tasks. Our brain filters uninteresting events. (What color was the car on your right 30 seconds ago?) Without conscious thought we subtly adjust the wheel to stay in lane or follow a curve in the road. But the moment an "interesting" situation takes shape, such as a car swerving from the adjoining lane, we focus full attention on it.

We focus full attention… as long as our core attention isn't elsewhere.

Studies show that we can divide attention only as long as non-foreground tasks are routine and repetitive – and only when we remain alert to changes in situation. A braking car while driving, another pedestrian while walking: we avoid them easily if we're alert, but we fail when we're looking at a cell phone (or map or book) while the situation changes.

We pay but partial attention.

We do not multitask; we context-switch, focusing for a few seconds on one task and then for a few seconds on another. If the second task demands our attention while we're working on the first, we respond ineffectively.

We know it's the wrong way to drive.

It's also an ineffective way to get work done, no matter how much we fool ourselves into thinking otherwise.

Lawyers are paid, directly or indirectly, for their time. Clients deserve full value for that time; I doubt anyone would seriously question that position.

So give them – and yourself – full value. Stop trying to multitask. Give each task its full-on focus, and when it's done, do the same for the next task.

Not only will you deliver more value, research shows you'll actually get more done each day.

(Shameless plug: My new book is The Off Switch: Discovering Your Work-Work Balance, from which most of this article is excerpted. Pick up a copy when it's released in January and learn the whole story, including why doing less at any one instant will lead to accomplishing more across the entire day.)

There are three ways to approach a skillset such as project management:

1. Have a specific rule to apply for every imaginable situation.
2. Analyze every situation anew, based on what you know.
3. Have a set of core principles that you apply as you recognize situations.

Let me offer an analogy. Let’s say I want to program a computer to play tic-tac-toe. I could do so using each of the three approaches above.

1, By rule: Tic-tac-toe is a simple game. There are only nine possible moves to start the game. For each opening move, there are but 8 possible responses, and so on. It adds up to a large but not unmanageable number of combinations. It’s an uncomplicated programming exercise, as well as a boring one. This appraoch works for tic-tac-toe, but the problem becomes impossibly huge for a more complex game such as checkers, let alone chess.

2, By analysis: Chess programs typically analyze each possible next move. They then examine various responses to those moves, responses to those responses, and so on. They look at what can happen one or two or three or more moves ahead. (I’m oversimplifying.) Not-very-good amateur chess players such as me do the same thing. However, chess is a lot more complex than tic-tac-toe. Tic-tac-toe is simple enough that a program can easily examine each move all the way to the end. That approach is reasonable for this simple game; it doesn’t take advantage of experience, but it costs almost nothing in computer processing time. However, there are far too many possibilities for this approach to work well in chess.

3, By principle: This line of attack would take the most programmer skil. In addition, there’s a risk of missing a good approach if the developer didn’t really think about the game.¹ The “principles” method would overcomplicate programming for a game as simple as tic-tac-toe. What about chess, though? Studies have shown that top players tackle games such as chess using principles (yep, oversimplifying again – it’s just an example). Programmers of the top chess programs are now trying to bring a “principles” approach to the computer.

Is project management tic-tac-toe, or is it chess?

It’s much closer to chess.²

I’ve known project managers who worked in each of these three styles.

The worst of them were those who used style 1, applying rules. Ironically, they tended to be educated in specific project management techniques without ever having been taught to truly manage projects. They had a rule for every situation. However, real-world situations are far more complex and nuanced than could be accommodated by the rules they’d learned. Project management would be much easier (and less interesting) if there were a simple set of rules you could apply, a magic wand you could wave. In reality, few projects in the legal world are as straightforward as tic-tac-toe.

I’ve known project managers who analyzed every situation before responding. They got most of their choices right, but they were often slow to respond, frustrating their co-workers. The “analysis” method comes up short when the project manager encounters something new or opaque, when she’s unable to figure out what’s really going on beyond what she see in front of her. In the legal world, most projects face an opposing party who considers it part of his job to make yours harder. (No, I don’t mean the client.) Opaque and unanticipated situations are the norm, and they’re often resistant to analysis.

The best project manages I’ve known worked from the principles they’d learned, often via the school of hard knocks. Like top chess players, they developed a “feel” for certain situations, recognizing patterns even when the circumstances were startlingly different. Sometimes they’d analyze a problem in depth, sometimes they’d apply simple rules to simple situations, but when necessary they could make sensible choices in new situations based on very incomplete data.

I remember one project manager I’d worked with as a colleague. At times we’d talk about the monster project he was working on. I’d ask why he handled a given situation the way he did, and sometimes he’d say, “It seemed the right thing to do.” When I’d press for details, most of the time he’d eventually figure out his own rationale; even though he was very self-aware as a person, however, such self-analysis wasn’t easy for him. I was often amazed at the intuitive leaps he made, and I think he himself enjoyed these mini after-action reviews as a way of building and codifying the principles of his style. He employed an approach to project management based on principles, following these principles even when he couldn’t immediately articulate them.

I think there’s a progression project managers go through. Most start off with a handful of rules. They quickly face a choice: Learn more rules as they recognize the increasing complexity of what they work on, or move up the chain to analysis and then to principles. The good ones realize that rules may provide the illusion of security but won’t be sufficient to effectively address complicated problems.

Simpler may sometimes be better, but simplistic rarely is.

That’s the Tao – or the tic-tac-Tao – of Legal Project Management.

___________________________

¹The traditional “rule” in tic-tac-toe is that the first player should start in the center. It’s the sure way to ensure a tie, but consider starting in one of the corners and then taking the diagonally opposite corner unless the opponent takes it first. Seriously. Try it.

²Actually, project management is more like bridge than chess. Both opponents and partners communicate via subtle signals, you know the set of pieces (cards) but not who will get what, the scoring system is incomprehensible to non-players, and there are multiple rounds (hands) in a session. In bridge, the opponents must explain honestly their signals and communication on request, while project managers have to figure out the veracity of the players in their game without really asking.

I’m watching a sailboat from my deck.

It’s a sunny day and there’s some wind, just a perfect day for sailing. As a picture, it looks idyllic. Call it a 10 on the idyllic-scenes rating scale. 

It’s Metaphor Time

I used to race sailboats, an amateur pastime at which I became reasonably adept. I can see that the person helming the sailboat isn’t very skilled. His (or her) sails are poorly trimmed, and he’s steering neither a straight nor terribly effective course. He rolled up his sails 30 seconds after I took the picture and turned to what sailors call the iron jib – the engine.

On the sailing skills scale, the skipper was, let’s say, a 2. He could sail the boat safely, I trust, but not effectively or efficiently. 

If he somehow moved his skill level up to even a 4, he could have kept sailing under these lovely conditions. He’d have made Port Hudson by dinnertime under quiet and elegant sail rather than with a noisy engine running. (No one buys a sailboat because they want to motor from place to place!) He didn’t need to be an 8 or 9 or 10, able to win races against tough competition in miserable weather. He just needed to be a 4 to sail a lot more often than he motored.

What Does It Mean?

The best project managers are 8s and 9s and 10s. That’s what it takes to build an airplane or erect a skyscraper. In the legal world, however, project leaders are more like that midafternoon sailor than those 8s and 9s and 10s. 

What they have in common with that sailor is that they only have to get from a 2 to a 4 to be far more successful in managing the project aspects of their legal matters/cases. Where they differ, of course, is that they can’t just turn to an engine if they don’t know how to harness the wind.

I’ve talked with attorneys who are afraid of project management in some way. For example:

• They worry they’ll have to learn boatloads of new skills totally unlike anything they already know. 
• They fear they’ll have to morph from attorney to project manager, envisioning an either/or proposition. 
• They’re afraid of displaying a lack of competence – and confidence – in front of peers or clients or partner committees. 

None of those fears are necessary, however understandable they may be. There might be some truth to them if attorneys had to become project managers with skill levels of 8 or 9 or 10. Most don’t. They just have to go from a 2 to a 4. 

Going from a 2 to a 4 is achievable. Legal Project Management starts from the skills attorneys already have, focusing, sharpening, and augmenting them in some simple project-specific ways. 

Attorneys turn not into project managers per se but into better attorneys: being in control of the non-substantive aspects of a legal project equates to more time to spend on significant client and legal issues. Because attorneys are able to focus more on those issues while standing tall at the helm of project concerns, their peers, clients, and, yes, senior partners will see them as more rather than less competent.

Not all attorneys are 2s as project managers, of course. There are some attorneys who have figured out how to manage large legal projects effectively and repeatably, just as there are self-taught sailors who’ve circumnavigated the globe. And some attorneys are 1s, just stepping into the boat and trying to figure out the bizarre arrangement of strings (a/k/a halyards and lines) that raise and trim the sails. While I applaud and celebrate those attorneys who are already strong project managers, I believe everyone – clients, firms, attorneys themselves – benefits when the 2s (and 1s) become 4s.

The gap between 2 and 10 can feel unbridgeable. The distance between 2 and 4 is easily spanned.

A good coach could in a few hours have taught that sailor the added skills he needed to derive full enjoyment from his sailboat this afternoon. He wouldn’t be a 4 by the time he tied up near the family of otters that have staked their own claim to the docks at Port Hudson, but with time on the water over what’s left of the summer and a bit of follow-up coaching, he’d easily be a 4 by the fall. 

Likewise, a training program in Legal Project Management, by itself, won’t turn you from a 2 in the morning to a 4 that evening, but with some practice and occasional coaching, you’ll be a 4 quickly enough. 

Finally, to belabor the metaphor one last time, everything on a boat has a unique name not found in the normal world, such as a “fiddle block with ratchet, cam, and becket” or a “clam cleat” (a pulley thingy and rope clamp, respectively). You don’t need to know the names of these things to sail the boat well. Likewise, while professional project managers often employ a lingo equally incomprehensible (“program definition phase” or “project evaluation and review technique,” anyone?), you don’t need the jargon to effectively manage legal projects.

May your next project have fair winds!

There’s been recent discussion about whether Legal Project Management is different from just regular plain ol’ project management.

It depends on how deep you want to look. Are a cat and a horse the same? They’re both mammals, right? Hair, four legs, warm-blooded…. But imagine if your sweet pet cat were the size of a horse. Her name for you would be “dinner.”

Likewise, at a superficial level Legal Project Management and traditional project management are the same. They have the same principles. They both seek to deliver work efficiently and effectively. They both are based on a combination of hard lessons learned and common sense. 

But dig down just a bit, and you begin to compare cats and horses.

You might ask, does it matter? Is it just a semantic difference? Actually, I can’t imagine a lawyer saying something is “just” a semantic difference, any more than one might suggest “we’re not going” and “we’re now going” differ only in a minor way.

The difference is a lot more than semantic. LPM isn’t traditional project management wrapped in a thin coating of “legal” to make it palatable to lawyers.

The Instability of Schedules

Let’s start by looking at scheduling, a core aspect of traditional project management (which I’ll call TPM). 

Consider a schedule as a two-dimensional chart. Put a timeline across the bottom. On the left side you list all of the tasks vertically; for each task, you draw a horizontal line indicating its duration, lined up with the timeline. (This picture is the basis of the Gantt chart, a vital tool in TPM.)

TPM starts from the assumption that a project manager can create this chart with a high degree of certainty. There may not be absolute certainty that Task 2, for example, will take 20 days, but the project manager knows the most probable duration (e.g., 20 days), knows the likely outside estimates (e.g., 19-22 days), and understands how likely the task is to be early or late.

Likewise, TPM assumes that the task list itself is knowable and fixed, that new tasks won’t appear out of the blue. The project manager may not know all of the tasks at the start of the project, but early on, before the project moves beyond the planning stage, she can nail down each of those tasks at a level of detail that allows her to control the project – i.e., more than simply “hire architect,” “pour foundation,” “build house,” and “move in.” There may be a small number of contingency tasks (“wall touch-up repainting”), but these are well understood, with known durations and probabilities.

This model works very well in many industries – construction, manufacturing, aerospace, and so on. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine significant projects in such industries succeeding without this kind of detailed and concrete project planning.

However, what happens if there is considerable doubt as to what the detailed task list really consists of (vertical instability), or as to how long those tasks will take (horizontal instability)? Suddenly, this core mapping of tasks against a timeline moves from quantitative and accurate to qualitative (at best) and indistinct. A rough picture can still be quite useful… but it is no longer a TPM planning tool.

Consider e-discovery, which is one area of legal work where project managers can to some extent apply TPM. From an LPO or outsourcer’s perspective, you can build a solid project plan, at least once you’ve sampled the documents to get an idea of how complex they are and perhaps gone through the preliminary keyword, production, and forensics battles. But that’s only part of the e-discovery picture. For the lawyer managing the case, the tasks surrounding the core EDRM activities (identification through production) are where she really earns her fee – and where both horizontal and vertical instability rear their heads. How much will the sides fight over keywords? Are backup tapes fair game? Is there disproportionate burden? Is one side using voluminous discovery as a threat rather than a truth-seeking tool? 

Discovery, of course, is just a small (but expensive) part of the litigation process. Litigation tasks can be described at a summary level, but a functional project plan requires a level of horizontal and vertical detail that is rarely known in advance, especially in the kind of big-ticket litigation where cost planning and control are most needed.

Beyond Scheduling

Task and schedule planning is but one aspect where LPM and TPM differ. The goal of most litigation, for example, is not to win at trial but to reach an outcome the client is relatively happy with (or at least can live with). That could happen when the jury returns a verdict, in a 15-minute phone call between parties on day 1, or anytime in between. Even “good outcome” is a charged phrase; bad press once an action gets rolling can cost a client far more than the attendant legal fees. All of these factors must be incorporated into management of the project; TPM has little vocabulary for doing so.

In addition, corporate clients in particular can themselves add a level of instability. For one thing, the legal team often has to please a plethora of internal stakeholders with competing objectives – and who may themselves be competing to move up the corporate ladder, sometimes subtly undercutting the other stakeholders. They may delegate key tasks to subordinates who don’t have the authority to sign for a pizza and then jump into discussions to reopen apparently settled questions. They move on to other positions, to be replaced by an executive who insists on stamping his own imprimatur onto every decision (which often means undoing whatever his predecessor decided). Legal work piles project instability upon project instability; it takes specific skills rather than TPM techniques to keep these projects on the path to success.

Note that I’m not suggesting project managers trained in TPM would not be capable of handling a legal project. The principles are the same even if their manifestations differ, and good project managers tend to be more flexible and adaptive than TPM methodology would suggest. However, such project managers would succeed only by moving beyond TPM tools and techniques.

Is Legal “Special”?

Some writers have suggested that Legal Project Management needs the “Legal” prefix only so that lawyers will accept it. Indeed, there is a perception in many quarters that “Legal is special,” that everything in the legal world must be bespoke.

The world of commercial and IT software development, for example, has a very similar set of problems: horizontal and vertical task/schedule instability, multiple stakeholders, shifting goals, the corporate client-go-round. (Goals may be controllable in version 7 of some software solutions, but early versions are generally exploratory; they have a broad set of sometimes conflicting goals and a certainty that you won’t achieve all of them, at least not if you want to release the solution in the current decade. There are exceptions such as avionics systems, but those exceptions exist in environments far more controlled and controllable than commercial software or IT solutions.) 

Some of the worst project management I’ve seen in my 35 years of managing people and projects has been in the software industry, where inflexible project managers have attempted to force TPM techniques onto their fluid surroundings. Indeed, one of my fears around Legal Project Management implementations is that IT will attempt to bring TPM to bear on the Legal world. I’ve worked with a few outstanding IT and commercial software project managers – but they steered clear of trying to force the round TPM pegs into the solution’s square holes. They succeeded by applying the approaches of “Legal” Project Management to their environment.

There are some aspects of LPM that are truly specific to the legal world, just as there are some aspects of TPM that apply exclusively to construction projects. Overall, though, it’s not that Legal is “special” per se, but rather than TPM tools and techniques are ill-adapted to the legal world.

There’s a lot more in play than semantics. The success of your projects depends on leaders – whether trained project managers or simply smart attorneys with common sense and good planning skills – who not only understand the differences but take a non-TPM approach that makes sense for the legal world.

“Trainwreck!”

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band are four bars – about eight seconds – into a song during a concert when The Boss yells out, “Trainwreck!”

It’s a song they haven’t played often, perhaps never even played at all. (They do that at times.) They’re close, but something’s off. It’s obvious to Springsteen and probably to the other band members as well – and he wants to fix it before it becomes obvious to the audience.

So he yells out “Trainwreck!” You can hear the smile in his voice; if he weren’t playing in front of 20,000 people, it would be pretty funny. On the other hand, a Springsteen concert consists of 20,000 newly close friends. He yells out “Trainwreck!” and counts the song off again: “One, two, three, four!” The band starts over and the second time around, the song gels. 

Sound like any projects you know?

At least the “Trainwreck!” part does, I’m sure.

But most of the time, it goes like this. You get four bars into the project, and you sense it’s an incipient trainwreck. After 16 bars, the equivalent of the first verse, you’re pretty sure. After the first chorus, the whole band – a/k/a the project team – knows it’s a trainwreck. And by the end of the second verse, you’re pretty sure the clients, your audience, knows too.

Springsteen, called The Boss for various reasons, had three choices. First, he could stop the song as soon as he sensed something was wrong. Second, he could have powered through it, getting each member of the band to watch his hands on the guitar. Third, he could have kept smiling for the audience and hoped the trainwreck would fix itself… while knowing it was just as likely to get worse as each of the other nine musicians took a separate approach to trying to repair what they were hearing.

He took the attitude that they owed the audience their best work, not simply the smoothest show. So he stopped, let the audience in on the fact that the song was heading south, and fixed the problem.

It takes a certain type of courage to admit a mistake before those who will judge you sense something’s wrong.

It take courage, and the recognition that what matters in the end is not your personal I-feel-good/I-feel-bad meter but rather what you deliver to your audience, your customers, your clients.

It’s never easy. Clearly Springsteen has earned a huge reserve of audience respect and trust against which he can draw. Not many project managers are in that situation.

However, project managers build those reserves through communication, honest appraisals, and of course delivery of value. When a trainwreck occurs, you fail to deliver value; worse, your clients may look back over the history of the project and decide that you also failed to communicate the problem and were less than honest about it. They’ll pull out far more from your trust bank than you can afford to replace.

When you see a trainwreck starting to happen, then, what do you do? Do you let it go, hoping it will fix itself? 

I suggest that this is precisely the time to gather the team about you, to call out “Trainwreck!” at least to the project team and figure out, before it gets worse, how to put the project back on track. Caught early, the problem may remain invisible to the client, who’s focused more on the results than the process; you’re going to deliver those results. But even if you share the incipient disaster with clients, they’ll usually be accepting and even grateful if you accompany the call with a description of how you’re fixing the problem, how you’ll keep a small problem from escalating into a full-scale trainwreck.

Springsteen’s The Boss in the world of music. Owning up to embryonic trainwrecks and resolving them rapidly are how you get to be The Boss on your project team.

Wanted: Legal project manager.

Reports to: Every lawyer in the place, and some of the paralegals as well

Required Skills: 

• Herding cats
• Finding the words in alphabet soup without the noodles
• Singing that song from Man of La Mancha with a straight face (though not necessarily on key)
• Able to leap at least small buildings in a single bound (trampoline permitted as accessory, but candidate must supply the trampoline)

Duties and Responsibilities: 

• Babysitting harried grown-ups 
• Saying “no” to professional negotiators who carry Getting to Yes in their pockets
• Plate spinning and chain-saw juggling
• Doing more with less
• Getting dual-optimal results when playing the Prisoner’s Dilemma

Useful Prior Experience: 

• Baseball umpire, with practice withstanding abuse from fans who never umpired even a tee-ball game
• Pacific Northwest weather forecaster, able to define 23 gradations of "rain" while recognizing that none of them will be accurate in advance
• Point guard with the Washington Generals, knowing you'll lose each night to the Harlem Globetrotters but still formulating on-the-fly game plans to get the ball, when you can find it, to your spot-up shooters
• Publicist to entitled movie stars whose names weren’t called at the Genie ceremony
• Cultural historian attempting to explain Canada to Americans (“no, it’s not a state” and “the Genies are our version of the Oscars”)

Salary: Are you kidding? You think you get paid for this? Work it in among your 2000-billable-hours requirement!

And Now, the Reality

The germ of this idea came from a question posed on line about what a job description for a legal project manager might look like, to which I responded off the cuff with a few of the snarks above. I felt and still feel the question is misguided, at least for 2011 and the next few years. The better question begins with this one: Is there a call for a standalone legal project manager position?

One could make a case that there are already project managers in place in e-discovery – and when there aren’t, there should be. That said, most of the e-discovery project managers I know are project managers in the Legal space rather than legal project managers. 

In other words, they’re not managing legal cases (or matters or files) but rather managing one aspect of a case. That aspect is enormous, expensive, and complex, but it has a shape different from that the practice of Legal Project Management. E-discovery project management deals with a far greater level of certainties and knowable metrics than does capital-LPM Legal Project Management.

I don’t want to split semantic hairs, and I certainly don’t want to denigrate the incredible efficiencies good project managers have brought to the messy and ever-fluid e-discovery world. However, I do want to call out the particular skill sets required for own-the-case Legal Project Management.

These skill sets are metaphorically represented above. 

They are metaphors, however, not jokes. If you don’t literally have to find words in noodle-free alphabet soup, you do need to make decisions based on partial information, knowing full well that key facts are not in evidence. And while lawyers rarely carry around personal copies of the Fisher and Ury classic negotiator’s bible, a legal project manager must develop the skill and ability to say “no” to lawyers who believe 1) everything is negotiable and 2) that no one, let alone a project manager, can use that two-letter word in their presence and live to tell the tale.

The bottom line is that, for the near future at least, the right legal project managers for full cases are senior lawyers already handling those cases. First, they’ll have the respect of the other players on the team. Second, for many at least, not until they do it and understand it themselves will they not feel threatened in some obscure way by the idea of project management. Third, they are by default project managers already, whether or not they know or recognize that fact – responsible for budgets, progress, client relations, and getting the right result for the client’s underlying business problem. As default project managers, they’re often inefficient at project management, spending more time than necessary herding the cats and becoming frustrated in the process. The final line of the mock job description, salary, is definitely not a joke.

Absent the call for separate legal project managers, we should be inculcating and developing Legal Project Management skills in today’s senior lawyers. 

In reality, then, the job description we really need belongs to the practice leaders. These are the folks who will benefit most from training their teams in the art and skills of Legal Project Management. It is to their existing job description that I would add one line: Supportive of LPM training for their teams… and committed to carrying it through to achieve better results.

Minor Footnotes on Umpiring and the Prisoner’s Dilemma

Umpiring is far more difficult than it looks. Calling balls and strikes on even a little league pitch – in real time, no slow-motion or replay allowed – is surprisingly difficult. You don’t have time to think it over, to reflect on what you saw; you have to call it based on a single impression. 

There’s a lot of that in project management, too. Often you have to make the call now, not on the big strategic issues but on the little things. Take too long and you paralyze the team, or lose their trust because of your indecision. (That’s just like umpiring.) Yet you know, just like the umpire, that your call is simply your best judgment in the moment, honed by experience and practice but still potentially incorrect with the hindsight afforded by slo-mo replay… or screaming fans with a rooting interest.

(By the way, think about donating your time as an umpire to a youth baseball or softball league. You won’t get any respect, but you’ll learn both how hard it really is and how to make mistakes and move on without self-recrimination. And our kids will have better experiences; most leagues really don’t have enough umpires.)

The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a game-theory experiment usually set up something like this: Two prisoners are in separate cells being interrogated about a crime for which they are jointly guilty. If one prisoner rats out the other, he goes free and the other gets ten years in jail. If, however, they both keep silent, they each get six months for another, minor crime and then get to go home.

(The Batman movie The Dark Knight climaxes with a variant of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, where two ferries filled with passengers each has a button to destroy the other.)

The best individual outcome in the Prisoner’s Dilemma is to rat out your partner in crime… before he rats you out. (In another variant, “first” is irrelevant; if you both rat out the other, you each serve serious time but less than the ten years if you cooperate and your partner turns on you.) However, the best-for-both-players outcome in the game is silence. 

You have to trust that your partner will keep silent in order to risk silence yourself (though if you know your partner will keep silent, you can choose to skate by taking advantage of him and his silence). A good project manager builds mutual trust in her co-workers, offering the hope that when difficult choices must be made, the team will unite around options that benefit the team (practice) as a whole rather than advantage one player at serious cost to the others.

How precise are the following statements?

1. The Canadian public debt as of 15 December 2010 was $275,872,478,414.44 CDN.
2. Canadian hourly-billing lawyers worked an average of 2043.96 hours last year.
3. Toronto Blue Jays slugger Jose Bautista hit .26 in 2010.

One answer: They are each precise to two decimal places.

Another answer: They are precise to 14 figures, six figures, and two figures, respectively.

I hereby state that I looked up answers to all three items before writing this column. So which of them do you believe? 

Chances are, based on precision alone, you believe one of them. No one knows the debt down to the penny, and who ever heard of a hitter, let alone breakout star, hitting .26, but it’s reasonable to believe a survey might show lawyers who track billable hours billing an average of 2043.96 hours last year.

Indeed, two of the three values are bogus. (I said I looked them up; I didn’t say I transcribed correct answers.)

But the bogosity adheres to the first two. Jose Bautista indeed got base hits in 26% of his official at-bats in 2010, or 0.26. However, we’re so used to seeing batting averages expressed as three digits of precision that the .26 number looks false. If I told you he hit .275, unless you’re absolutely up-to-date on Blue Jays stats, you’d undoubtedly have said that was right. But he didn’t hit .275, he hit .260, which is equal to .26. 

(For the record, the Canadian public debt was about twice the number listed on 15 December, and no one has any idea of the average number of hours without first deciding who’s included in the sample. What about the aging solo practitioner in Medicine Hat who still keeps two occasional clients? The lawyer just starting out in the small BC fishing community of Ucluelet? Count all the individual practitioners and it’s clear the number is significantly overstated.)

All of these numbers had various degrees of precision about them. Likely #1 was so precise that it made you question its accuracy – or at least it should have. If you thought about it, you’d have said the same about #2. And perhaps #3 seemed so lacking in precision it, too, had to be bogus.

Precision and accuracy are very different animals.

What if I’d said instead:

1. The Canadian public debt is half a trillion dollars.
2. Canadian hourly-billing lawyers in the 50 largest firms billed 2000 hours last year on average. 
3. Jose Bautista got one hit in every four at-bats.

They aren’t very precise, but all are reasonably accurate. (For baseball stats geeks, the difference between Bautista hitting .260 and .250 was about six total hits last year.) 

We are attracted to precision in this age of reason, but precision alone is no guarantee of value. It’s possible to be highly precise but wildly inaccurate.

Yet in report after report in the legal world, we are bombarded with data whose precision may obscure questions of accuracy. Hourly billing data, for example, says very little about efficacy; I’ve seen cases where lawyers billed thousands of hours without delivering value because, for example, case strategy was misaligned with business goals. Likewise, is the best attorney the one who bills the most hours?

When looking at data, the first thing to do may be to strip all precision from the data and then test it for accuracy. 

That’s where the T-shirts come in.

T-shirts aren’t sized with great precision; rather, they’re marked small, medium, large, and extra-large, with occasional XS and XXL outliers. Apply “T-shirt sizing” when you first look at data. Is it about right? Does it pass the “sniff test”? 

Data with high levels of precision start to feel like a math test. It’s generally accepted that not everyone in the legal world is a math whiz. However, you don’t have to be any sort of math star to think about precision and accuracy as separate, independent factors. Both can give you insight into value of the number in question.

A quick assessment of accuracy – T-shirt sizing style – can tell you something about the likelihood that the data point is valid. A quick assessment of precision can tell you something about the person presenting the data point.

As for the Blue Jays… well, you don’t need a lot of math to know they’re markedly better than my hometown Seattle Mariners!

What do call waiting and ramp metering have in common with legal projects?

(Ramp metering refers to stoplights on highway entrance ramps that space out merging traffic during busy periods.)

No, it’s not that some people want to sue over them.

Rather, they require a balancing of competing interests to function most effectively. They also hark back to the urgent-v.-important equation.

Call Waiting and Individual Choice

Call waiting involves three parties but leaves the choice in the hands of one.

Personally, I detest call waiting. In effect, the person at the center says, “I don’t know who’s calling, but they’re more important than you” when she puts you on hold to see who’s on the other line. It’s no different, really, than sitting in someone’s office when her phone rings and she answers it. Even when she knows who’s calling, being shunted aside makes you feel you’re with someone who’s mistaking urgent for important.

Too often, the person at the center of the triad, the person receiving the (second) call, makes an instantaneous rather than considered judgment as to the balance of competing interests. 

What’s that look like in a legal project?

First, any project manager who doesn’t turn off call waiting on his cell phone can send an I-don’t-care-about-your-problem message at an inopportune time – not that there’s often an opportune time for such a message.

However annoying the reality may be, it’s the metaphor that really bears examining. People leading projects, whether project managers or team leaders, are continually faced with competing calls on their time and resources. To be effective, leaders must not only recognize – in advance – that they will be pulled in multiple directions, they must lay plans to evaluate these pulls in a consistent manner.

The project leader cannot work solely in reactive mode, responding to whatever interruption has happened most recently. Nor can she plan her entire day and work only to plan, because she’ll create bottlenecks for those who do have immediate needs.

She must be prepared for interruptions, while handling them in a non-disruptive manner. That takes a level of maturity and forethought, the balancing of immediate hue-and-cry with longer-term planning.

Ramp Metering and System-Wide Cost/Benefit Analysis

While ramp metering isn’t perfect – in particular, it can back up local streets at some entrance ramps – studies show that overall it works. Controlling the spacing of merging cars smooths and speeds up the flow of traffic on the highway.

However, it may take a bit longer if you’re in a car trying to enter the highway.

Consider this example: There are 10 cars each delayed an average of 60 seconds by the ramp meter. At the same time, 90 cars each gain 30 seconds back on their commute because of less slowing at the merge point. The system as a whole gains (90 x .5) – (10 x 1) minutes, 35 minutes. An average, each car gains 21 seconds. 

That’s good… unless you’re the one stuck behind the ramp’s red light.

Some attorneys – and non-attorneys – take a “me”-focused view of the world around them. Thus if the somehow see some project practice as blocking what they want to do, or when they want to do it, they may assume that the project leader is incompetent, the whole idea of project management is broken, or both. They’re fuming behind the ramp meter.

But they’re not looking at the system as a whole. If one attorney is delayed for 5 minutes while nine people on the project team each gain 2 minutes of effective work time, the project team as a whole has gained 13 minutes, or 1 minute 18 seconds apiece, on average. Even if that attorney’s time is in some way – billing rate, salary, etc. – twice as valuable as that of others on the team, there is still a net gain to the project team. (“Average” has its own issues, as discussed in my book Legal Project Management, but it’s a good-enough approach here.)

Here’s where project management becomes project leadership, in helping the attorney understand the impact to the project as a whole – and dealing with the additional disruption (the technical term is tsuris) caused by the visibly unhappy attorney.

It’s not just attorneys who can overrate the “me” factor. We’re all stars in our own play.

“I, Me, Mine”

The late George Harrison wrote “All through the day, I-me-mine, I-me-mine, I-me-mine.” The effective project leader hears that, and responds. She doesn’t ignore it, and she doesn’t add her own I-me-mine to the conversation. But she understands the costs and benefits to the project as a whole from competing interests, narrow focus, interruptions, and more.

It’s quite a mess to sort out – leadership needed, not just management. It’s another reason why good project leaders are both rare and highly valuable.

Driving the other day, I saw the following electronic highway sign:

Seattle:
Rte. I-90 19 mins
Rte. 520 14 mins

There are only two bridges from Bellevue to Seattle, so I had to choose one of these routes. No-brainer, right? Take Rte. 520 and save five minutes.

Not so fast, so to speak. Seattle’s not a small town. Both these routes lead there, but they leave drivers in very different places. Does “Seattle” refer to where each road enters the city, or to a specific spot? If the latter, where? Depending on where I want to go in Seattle, I-90 may indeed be the faster route. Or maybe not.

In other words, this sign contains far less information than is apparent on the surface. Worse, it’s not at all clear how to act on whatever information I might glean.

It contains data, not information.

The Data Dump

Some managers – project managers, people managers, business managers – are in love with data. “Give me data,” they cry, and their teams scurry around to dredge up numbers from all aspects of their work. They measure the measurable, and develop substitute metrics for the unmeasurable – or make up numbers. They hound others for data. They count what counts, and count what doesn’t count. They toss factoids galore into the manager’s blender; the manager presses “puree,” and out comes… mush. 

But the manager doesn’t know it’s mush, or can’t distinguish mush from a strawberry smoothie. She has data to cover every base, and cover her behind as well.

But data devoid of context is just that, data. It’s not information. It doesn’t drive informed decisions, or foster creative solutions. Neither managers nor team members can act efficiently on data alone, no matter how much of it they pour from that blender. 

When a manager says, “I’m data driven,” or “this is a data-driven organization,” do some driving yourself in the opposite direction. Or get used to disappointment.

Let’s go back to that all-data-no-information highway sign. Given the same three lines of about 18 characters each, the sign could easily have read:

Space Needle Rte 520
Waterfront Rte I-90
Conven Ctr Rte 520

There’s not as much raw data, but there is now information I can act on. If one bridge is blocked by an accident, as too often happens, the sign can offer that information instead; otherwise, both commuters and visitors can benefit when providers transform the disappointment of data into useful information. 

A simple example of this transformation is the unloved status report.

Status Reports

It’s said that people detest status reports because they so clearly demonstrate the lack of progress.

Unfortunately, most status reports demonstrate nothing at all. They take too long to write, they’re often out of date or less than honest, and they offer little to act on. In other words, they contain data but little information.

The 3×3 (“three by three”) status report addresses most of these issues. It can’t cure dishonesty or directly jumpstart progress where there is none, but it does capture and transmit useful information in a limited time. They take little time to write and to grasp.

A 3×3 contains three sets of up to three bullet points each:

• What I/we did since the last 3×3 
• What I/we will do before the next 3×3
• Issues I/we need help with or want to raise an alert on

Each bullet point is limited to a single line, and none of the three categories can have more than three bullet points. Generally I suggest doing 3×3 reports either weekly or fortnightly, though there are teams on fast-moving projects that do them daily or thrice weekly at a morning “war room” meeting.

If it takes time to recall what you’ve done in creating a 3×3, you probably haven’t accomplished much. Likewise, being unsure or unwilling to commit to work in the next few days isn’t a good sign. And don’t be afraid to ask for help or alert the reader to a potential issue.

As a manager, I used 3x3s to keep current with multiple teams and projects, to catch shifting priorities, and of course to spot roadblocks I could help remove. 

I would compare the “three things I did” with the previous iteration of “three things I will do.” Disparities sometimes mean problems have been uncovered or progress has been slower than hoped or promised; however, often they reveal that someone – quite possibly me – is resetting priorities, whether intentionally or accidentally. I remained particularly alert for situations where a team member understood a change in priorities but hadn’t confirmed the reality of the change – e.g., taking an offhand comment as a directive.

Be at least a little suspicious if there is never anything in the third grouping, “issues.” It’s not uncommon for there to be a 3×3 period with no issues. However, if a given person or team almost never reports an issue, that’s a sign that there may be an underlying team-dynamics problem.

I didn’t necessarily ask that a 3×3 be presented as a document or EMail. As a department manager, I’d meet with my direct reports in weekly or fortnightly one-on-one sessions and simply ask, “What’s gone well this week? What’s not going so well? What can I help you with? What’s on your plate for next week?” (Together, the second and third questions represent the “issues” part of the 3×3 in conversational form.) 

I long ago learned long-form status reports were a pain to write; as a manager I discovered they were no fun to read either. Over time, I recognized that the problem was the collection of random data dumped into my blender, often shrouded in near-unintelligible business-speak. Creating a simple structure, where two of the three headings represented a bias for action, helped me turn the data into information – and saved a whole lot of time in the writing and reading of it. 

Data should underlie decisions wherever possible. But data can’t drive good decision making; for that, you need information you can understand, test, and act on.

(This column is modified from my forthcoming book, The Third Sigma.)

I was talking with a friend recently about legendary basketball coach John Wooden, who passed away at the age of 99 this month. My friend worked in close proximity to Wooden in the early 70s, when UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) was unquestionably the best college basketball team in the world, completing an unprecedented and unequaled streak of seven consecutive (US) national championships.

He told me a couple of stories that bear on project management.

Building From the Ground Up, Starting With the Socks

He said Coach Wooden spent the first five minutes of the first practice each year teaching the players the correct way to put on their basketball socks. He spent the next five minutes teaching them the right way to tie their shoes.

Micromanager, right?

Ah, context is everything.

Socks that wicked away moisture and that didn't bunch up were new inventions back then. Wooden had seen too many players have to come off the court – or play less effectively – because they had developed blisters from socks that slipped just a bit. To most of us, it's not a big deal, but to a 90-kilos-plus athlete pounding up and down a basketball court for 40 minutes drenched in sweat, a slight misalignment of socks can quickly lead to blisters.

And Wooden had lost a basketball game early in his career when a defender's shoelaces had come untied; the player had to slow down and his opponent, unguarded, hit the winning shot.

How much attention to detail is too much detail? It depends on the context. Coach Wooden believed that ten minutes up front could have a big payoff down the road.

I suspect these introductory lessons also set Coach Wooden up with his players as a professional, a coach who understood the game at a deeper, richer level than the players had ever thought about… without having to show off in some way. Of course, after a time – and 88 consecutive wins – no one could have doubted his abilities, but he didn't get to 88 wins simply by recruiting center extraordinaire Bill Walton and putting Walton's beloved Grateful Dead on the hi-fi.

No Last-Minute Timeouts, No Play Diagramming

Today you see coaches calling two or three timeouts in the final minute of a close game to set up specific plays, diagramming them on a small whiteboard while the players huddle around.

Coaches did that back in the 70s, too… except for Wooden.

He set up plays, of course, but he did that during practice. No frantic diagramming on the fly; rather, his huddles were centers of calm. He'd confidently remind the players that they knew how to play, and how to win, and now would be a good time to remember that.

He believed that last-minute timeouts helped the team that was less well prepared, settling them down and giving them a specific per-play focus in the tense closing seconds. His team was fully prepared. They knew what to do, say, down two points, ten seconds to play, taking the ball out after an opposing basket. Why give the other team time to prepare a specific defense, or even have the coach remind them of one fact or another?

He trusted his players.

He prepared them, he taught them, and then he let them play.

After all, he couldn't take the shot, or dribble the ball, or set a pick.

There's a lesson there for project managers as well.

The Start and the Finish Are Worlds Apart

For many coaches, practices begin with a shootaround or scrimmage, or with diagramming plays. And games end with frantic scribbling as winded, tense players try to grasp a new play with seconds remaining in the game.

For Coach Wooden, practices began with some "housekeeping" that began preparing players to be able to give their best without distractions at "crunch time." And games ended with him sitting quietly on the bench, trusting his players and their joint preparation.

Which start, which finish do you want your projects to encounter?

Projects are won or lost in the first days, in the Initiation stage. Sometimes you can save them with last-minute interventions, but well prepared projects need far less saving.

So perhaps we should all as project managers take a few lessons from Coach Wooden:

1. Start by understanding that one of your biggest jobs is to remove roadblocks; that job starts the moment you know you'll be working on the project.
2. When things go wrong at the end of a project, it's usually because you missed something at the beginning. (For example, what does "Done" look like? Who are the hidden stakeholders? Who's the real client? What's her business problem?)
3. Set a clear project vision, put together a great and committed team, and get out of their way.

Needless to say, if you want to win 88 in a row, you can't do it with project management technique alone; you still have to recruit Bill Walton. But it's funny how the best project managers – and the calmest in crunch time – always seem to recruit the best team members.