Now it’s time to look at the JIT Project Manager’s toolkit. How do we put these ideas into practice in our day to day work?
Through Workflow Strategies, a set of practical techniques for executing modern projects. Here is the full list, according to whether they work better for small or large-scale projects, and what kind of situation they are best suited for.
| Capture | Organize | Share | ||||||
| Scale | Planning | Offloading | Tracking | Metadata | Linking | Searching | Adapting | Structuring |
| Small | Archipelago of Ideas | Color Commentary | Meta-Plan | Naming Conventions | Interlinking Notes | Advanced Search | Dial Down the Scope | Sentence Hacking |
| Large | Headings First | Status Summary | Temporary Tags | Tag Hierarchy | Table of Contents | Brainsweep | Context Switch | Function Follows Form |
We are now in the crucial execution stage, where all our previous efforts at capturing, summarizing, and organizing packets of knowledge will pay off. It is in this final stage that we see whether the intermediate packets we’ve created end up being valuable.
Execution is also the most ambiguous stage, because people’s individual circumstances tend to diverge quite a bit. Whether you are an accountant or an airline pilot makes a big difference when it comes to applying what you know.
That’s why Workflow Strategies are less of a process, and more like a toolkit. The 16 individual strategies are each designed for a particular situation or problem to be solved. In the same way that different tools in your tool chest are suited for different jobs.
These Workflow Strategies are designed to help us execute our projects more effectively. They are standardized procedures that help us move faster, save our progress, and produce work of higher quality. They rely on having clearly summarized packets of knowledge (through Progressive Summarization) organized according to actionability (with P.A.R.A.), allowing us to combine those packets into valuable deliverables right at the moment they’re needed.
Here are the 16 Workflow Strategies we’ll cover in this chapter:
- Archipelago of Ideas
- Headings First
- Color Commentary
- Status Summary
- Meta-Plan
- Temporary Tags
- Naming Conventions
- Tag Hierarchy
- Interlinking Notes
- Table of Contents
- Advanced Search
- Brainsweep
- Dial Down the Scope
- Context Switch
- Sentence Hacking
- Function Follows Form
In this article I’ll provide a brief overview of each strategy, with further guidelines and examples in the next article.
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