Overview on Project Management

Project management is a series of methods, frameworks, and tools that are typically owned by Project Managers, Production Coordinators, Production Managers, and Producers. There is a lot of nomenclature that's used here that feels complicated but it's really stuff you're probably doing anyway (particularly in corporate and DevOps settings).

The best way to stay organized is to manage your tasks as well as manage what you own (and what you don't). You can do this using a notebook. If you don't do that already, start with that. 

In Project Management, there are a bunch of traditional approaches that may sound familiar to you. Here's a hierarchical chart of how these things work. There are many other project management methods, but these are the ones that appear frequently in Creative Technology processes – at least, altruistically 😉.

• Overall Project Management Methods
  • Agile or Waterfall
    • Frameworks for Implementing an Agile Method (Flexible, Continuous Flow)
      
      • Scrum or Kanban
        • Sprints
          • Tasks
            • Tools for Managing a Method
              • Kanban Boards
              • Task Tracking Tools
    • Structures for Implementing a Waterfall Method (Phase Based)
      
      • Tasks within Phases
        • Tools for Managing a Structure
          • Gantt Charts
          • Milestone Trackers
          • Traditional Calendars

You can use a series of approaches to project management within a single project. For example – When you use a Gantt chart to manage the overall timeline of a project that is also using the Scrum Framework to manage the tasks, you're using a Waterfall approach to time (e.g., the pre-production phase is 2 months), a scrum approach to manage each sprint (e.g., the pre-production scrum includes the "locations search and locations acquisition" sprints), and you're using a Kanban board to manage the individual tasks (e.g., Jeff : scout Central Park then do a locations report. Tony : review all of Jeff's locations reports and create a summary for the EP. EP : confirm locations and get Jeff to confirm location acquisitions). If this makes sense to you, congratulations, you understand the basic concepts of Project Management. 

The tools to manage these tasks include : Jira, Trello, AirTable, Miro, Spreadsheets, a Shitty Notebook. Most of these tools include all of the things you need to manage a project : Kanban boards, task management.