Managing Your Projects
Derek Damron
July 26, 2016
Or…
How to plan just a little bit so it’s easy to get shit done
Why bother?
1. The good habits you build now will pay dividends in the future
Why bother?
2. It feels good when you finish things
Why you?
Important regardless of whether you’re an individual contributor or a manager
What this talk is not
- A list of random tasks to make you better
- An advertisement for a particular tool
- An exhaustive manual of being productive
What this talk is
A framework for working
quickly and effectively
What’s the secret?
Stop and think before you dive in
What’s so special about that?
Thinking first helps you:
- Prioritize tasks
- Maintain perspective
- Anticipate roadblocks
How should I think?
- Map out the big steps
- Break the big steps into bite-sized chunks
- Identify potential surprises
Example 1
We want to assess whether some new variables improve a previous model fit
Let’s break it down
Some observations
Communication is often an afterthought when, in reality, it’s one of the most important steps
Some observations
2. Bite-sized chunks should be both mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive
Example 2
We want to develop an ongoing sentiment analysis of Allstate’s public brand
Break it down redux
More observations
1. Sometimes we have to reapply the process to substeps
- Like constructing a data pipeline
- Or picking metrics
- Or almost everything
More observations
2. What makes a chunk “bite-sized”?
My rules of thumb that tell me a task is “small enough”:
- Will take at least a few hours of work
- e.g. vetting a particular source
or
- I need to hold myself accountable for it
- e.g. putting something on Confluence
Wait a minute…
- Are these examples oversimplified?
→ Absolutely
- Did we gloss over some major steps?
→ Quite likely
- Does this diminish the usefulness of this framework?
→ Not even a little bit
Questions?
