The start of Project Management with G Adventures
I think it’s safe to start this off by saying that project management, in at least one of its forms, exists within any organization or structure. I did a quick look up online about the history of project management not really expecting to find a whole lot — turns out I was quite wrong, and that the notion of project management dates as far back as the 18th century. Huh. But when you think about it, isn’t it logical? Doesn’t this make sense? Most environments we work in or at least some aspects of our lives need a form of coordination, scheduling or planning. In the current day and age, almost every activity can be classified or treated as a project. It’s just so easy with tools available at your fingertips, quite literally.
So, here’s the main question — how come it feels like a novelty? Because with us here at G Adventures it certainly is.
If you’ve done any reading about who we are (if not, check us out here we’re kinda cool), G Adventures prides itself on its Core Values. And indeed, we are fortunate to work in a company that embodies the definition of the word “Freedom”. But with this, there are challenges we face while working in a company like this, specifically in a service oriented department such as our Technology team. Because, ultimately, we don’t want to impact customer experience with the team: we aim to be approachable and keep our communication pathways open with the company. Furthermore, we experience challenges that are associated with working within a very fast paced, quickly growing business in the tech boom of the 21st century.
Our Technology department is very interrupt-driven — for those of you who aren’t really sure what this means, in a nutshell: we focus on whatever is most important that day/week/month. Because we’re founder-led, this approach allows us to be able to switch context at the drop of a hat. Fun, right?
It’s been a (somewhat) slow crawl towards a very obvious conclusion that our current process can only get us so far before we start jeopardizing both company growth and our own sanities. Meaning that we had to start figuring out processes that help us more effectively identify priority projects, needs, realistic completion times while balancing the well-being of our developers, and the expectations of our stakeholders — who don’t always have a grasp on what it takes to launch a platform/software/feature. It’s easier to scale back on restrictions and processes than it is to establish new ones. User acceptance can be a fickle thing.
So here we go. We’re working on introducing project management processes into our G ecosystem, while also recognizing that there isn’t a single PM approach that would work for us completely. Our company ecosystem wouldn’t work well with a classic waterfall approach, nor can we be completely agile — so we’ll do what we do best: create our own process that accommodates the quirky, different, and ever-changing company culture that is G, while leveraging the benefits and principles used in classic Project Management.
Throughout the following weeks we’ll be talking about some of our newly-established processes, Trello and general hiring for Project Coordinator roles. If this all sounds like something riveting for you, keep following us on Medium or Twitter to stay up to date with our posts.
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