The UX of Project Management
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The slides for my talk at IgniteuxMI. In this presentation I discussed my research on the user experience of the workplace, focusing specifically on how project managers can extend UX thinking to facilitating positive workplace experiences and thinking of employees as participants in project work.
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The UX of Project Management
- 1. The UX of Project Management Ben Lauren | blauren@msu.edu @benlauren | benlauren.com
- 2. A Few Questions ๏ How do we experience our working environment? ๏ How do our experiences influence project work? ๏ How can employees participate in shaping the UX of project management?
- 8. I’m not suggesting that project managers stop planning and organizing, but I am suggesting that project managers can also facilitate and empower participation in developing more productive workplace experiences.
- 11. What was disrupting project work?
- 12. Agile workflow extends project activities across a variety of digital and physical working environments in adaptive and responsive ways.
- 18. Participation
- 19. Empathy
- 20. Takeaways ๏ Project managers should seek insight from employee workplace experiences; ๏ Adaptive, responsive workplaces begin with empathy for employees; ๏ A lack of employee participation may fuel resistance to changing work processes.
Editor's Notes
- My name is Ben Lauren, I’m an assistant prof. in the XA program at MSU. I’m going to talk to you about some research that I did and what I learned about PM.
- My research has shown me that our experience in the workplace has a large influence on project work. How we experience the workplace influences our own motivations, objectives, goals, and ultimately, project outcomes.
- I recently studied a company that was changing work processes to ultimately try to build positive customer experiences. But, as they changed how projects would be managed, they created top-down mandates of how project work would be coordinated.
- What really surprised me was how difficult it was for many of my participants to see 5 years into the future. They knew job titles and descriptions would change, but some were confused about the changes in their workflow and felt their unique knowledge of the working environment had been overlooked.
- Some members of the team felt lost at sea, and at times, afraid of the ambiguity and uncertainty they experienced when working on projects. Sometimes work wouldn’t get done in the way expected by the project manager, which caused frustration.
- And then I had an aha moment! Maybe employees felt lost in project work because the new way of managing projects had been implemented top-down instead of bottom up.
- The team wasn’t thought of as participants in the working environment with important stories, needs, experiences, and insight not just about project work, but the spaces and places where project work occurs, and even more, the tools and resources used.
- So, it wasn’t the change in work processes that really posed a problem, it was a lack of engagement with employees when requiring the use of a software PM system some employees felt didn’t serve their needs
- In UX, we spend so much time working to build positive experiences for customers, and we need to extend that thinking to other areas of our work, such as how we manage projects. Even down to the software we use. Otherwise unproductive disruptions can occur, and project work can stall.
- In the case of my research, project work became filled with work-arounds and improvisation. For instance, as I explained, employees received a top-down mandate to use a new PM software, but instead of using the software, they would email each other.
- The new software was meant to support an agile workflow, but the mandate employees weren’t given ownership over their own workflow. Email represented a sense of control, a way of staying in charge.
- As a result, project information was stored in a variety of places and spaces, which caused confusion at times. Maybe that could have been avoided through disrupting the top-down approach to developing PM strategy.
- For instance, in resisting the PM software for email, the project manager could have seen an opportunity for productively disrupting the workflow through engaging with employees as participants in the work environment.
- Or, when employees improvised solutions to coordination problems in meetings, those improv skills could be understood as inspired by a mindset indicative of the working environment. We usually improvise based on experience.
- Which leads me to bigger questions. Buzz words circulate about developing responsive and adaptive websites. But, I wonder what an adaptive and responsive workplace would be like? How would it function?
- I think the answer to these questions begin with thinking about the UX of project management, working to facilitate valuable experiences for employees—to not think of them as employees at all, but as participants.
- Participation may be the first step toward a responsive and adaptive working environment. An environment open to the sometimes unpredictable change of industry and technology and globalization.
- And through empathy for users of the workplace environment, we can begin to build more adaptive and responsive working environments, but with the help of the people that actually work in the environment.
- My 15 second takeaway.