According to Frederic Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management, the goal of managing workers “should be to secure the maximum prosperity for the employer, coupled with the maximum prosperity for each employee.” At the same time that Taylor, a mechanical engineer, rose from the factory floor to become one of America’s first workplace narcs (or consultants), another engineer, Henry Gantt, popularized and codified the basics of the Gantt chart, a simple bar chart that turns a project’s schedule into a set of lines on an x- and y-axis, with time moving from left to right. The key to these deficiencies lies in the history of workplace efficiency itself-starting with the original business consultants.Īnd so the 1900s ushered in what we know as project management. And yet none of these PM software services make work work. But in an increasingly digital, increasingly remote age of work, you might still imagine that a “killer app” really would win. And if, like me, you’ve ping-ponged between a couple of jobs and project teams over a few years, you’ve had to come to terms with the fact that misunderstandings and confusion are natural in any large workforce. More than a hundred proprietary apps and planners are currently vying for companies’ business, all promising increased productivity, seamless workflow, and unmatched agility. The list seems endless and yet is somehow still growing. Your onboarding will include an invitation to collaborate from the likes of Smartsheet, Notion, Udemy, ClickUp, Projectworks, Wrike, and Height. If you work as an “individual contributor”-engineer, copywriter, designer, data analyst, marketer-in the modern white-collar workforce, you’ve probably encountered one of these project-management software (PM software) enterprises. The company had moved on from Trello and was now in the thrall of something called. I came back as a contractor a few years later, and everything had not changed. As I was leaving that job, I heard someone mention that a new program, Trello, was going to replace Airtable and “change everything” for us. But efficiencies were still being lost, apparently, and Airtable took the blame. I was laid off before I had to learn Jira, and at my next gig they swore by Airtable, which, phew, I already knew. At my next job, the marketers made us learn Asana (“same as Airtable but much better”), but the product team pushed their work and sprints through Jira. When I worked as a copywriter at a dog-toy-slash-tech company, we used Airtable and Basecamp to organize our workflows.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |