Andrew Filev is the author of the Project Management 2.0 blog and CEO of Wrike. He has a very interesting view on Project Management, which he describes as Project Management 2.0. He also created an amazing PM Tool that supports his notion of Project Management 2.0: Wrike.

I had a great interview with him, which I will share with you in three parts over the next few weeks. This is part one in which he explains the concept of emerging structures and how this relates to Project Management.

Emerging Structure

Bas: "There are two terms you use when talking about Project Management 2.0 and Wrike: collective intelligence and emerging structure. With “collective intelligence” you make use of your entire organization. But could you clarify “emerging structure”?"

Andrew: "Sure. Let’s say there is a group of people working on something. You may have a top-down approach, when the manager or the head of the group implies structure. In the project management case, it’s most likely a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). The project manager spends some time at the beginning of the project and designs a WBS that will stay throughout the project. It will probably be extended a little bit, made more detailed, but there is little chance that the WBS will be changed dramatically. Because that is very hard to do, it would require the project manager to re-plan everything himself, and that’s a lot of hassle.

Photography by Woodlywonderworks.

Conversely, the way emerging structures work in project management is like this: If different parts of the organization or different members of the team designed a structure that works for them, then when they collaborate and apply collective intelligence, they start to align those structures together."

Comparing it to software design

Andrew: "There is a good metaphor — the agile approach to doing software design. The traditional approach to software design is to design everything upfront. People who use agile methods often design the parts, align them and then let the software’s bigger design emerge out of that, as they help it along the way. It’s not like they just put the pieces together and it works perfectly right up front; they sometimes change the design. That is called refactoring in the software industry. The same thing happens with the emerging structures and project managers. People work on different things and start to align those things. There is guidance from their leader or project manager, and it helps the whole structure to emerge.

There is the clear distinction between chaos and emerging structure. In the beginning, it’s kind of a chaotic; you've got separate notes, separate people or teams working on different things. But once they start to align these elements, something bigger emerges. It’s no longer a chaos; it’s a clear structure. If you are a project manager, you don’t just see it and wait until this thing emerges by itself; you provide your guidance, and you help the elements to align. You do something top-down. That’s absolutely normal. You don’t stay away from it; you play an active role in it."

Photography by Josiah Mackenzie.

Bas: "As I understand it, if you do it purely bottom-up, you can have chaos because there is no alignment. If you do it only top-down, it can be too rigid. The combination can be found in defining the initial state, some rules of interaction, and from this the structure will emerge."

Andrew: "That’s correct. It goes hand-in-hand with collective intelligence. If people are not collaborating, nothing will emerge, or there will be chaos. The vice-versa is also true; if you don’t have flexibility in your tools and processes, there will be strict force, and the collaboration will end by that force. As the recent research shows, the collective intelligence has lot to do with weak connections, not just strong connections, so there has to be some flexibility for things to start working together and give really good results."

Tools to the Rescue

Andrew: "In my opinion, it is crucial that your tools and the processes allow you to use multiple structures in a broad sense. In a project management context, you have to be able to apply several work breakdown structures simultaneously.

In traditional project management software, there is no way to have different views. You can do only one WBS, while in the real world there are different views. For example, if you speak about organizations, right now a lot of companies are run in the matrix way. If you deal with that, you start to get different views of the same point in time. You have views by departments, you have views by activities, and you have views by projects. And within the projects, you can have different views based on their timelines. There might be dimensions by feature or maybe by different campaigns, if we speak about marketing.

Traditionally, the project management software left these dimensions out of scope and focused strictly on WBS. The software should take care of this and help people structure the information.

Let me give you another example. In companies right now, there is a big gap between strategic plans. They are often kept in a word document. Then their correlated plans, their sales plans, their project plans and their daily to-dos. All those things are kind of kept separated. When I talk about “emerging structure,” it implies that the writing tools and writing processes that create these plans should be the pieces of one integrated structure, one master plan.

In my vision of project management software, it should allow the whole organization to be covered. The software should be easy to use, so people won’t have problems. It will be as usable as e-mail. The software should be transparent, so the CEO of the company should be able to see where the company stands."

Connecting A To Do List With A Strategic Plan

Photography by Tanakawho.

Bas: "Can you explain how your tool makes the connection between a to-do list and the strategic planning in a word document. How does it pull everything together?"

Andrew: "That’s really simple. Let’s say a person has his own to-do list. That to-do list is part of a bigger project plan that in turn is part of correlated plan that can in turn be a part of a strategic plan. I don’t mean there is a stiff structure built in like this. It’s a structure the company can build for itself along the way. When there is this connection, if the person changes something in his to-do list, the schedule will be updated on the upper levels as well.

The tool allows people to have their own to-do list. Their managers can have visibility into the team’s to-do list and can put this into the team plan. On the upper level, the project manager has visibility into the plans of the different teams under him, enabling him to align the teams and structure the information as a project plan.

This is an example. People can configure their own structure. People start using the tool; they start from one task; they start to organize things; they start to align items, and then it evolves into something bigger. The employee does not necessarily have to view the whole plan. The CEO has the whole picture, but any employee can, depending on the policies of the company, depending on the goals, see only parts of the picture."

Part 2: You Can't Create A Plan From Emails (But Wrike Can)