<rant>
For the uninitiated (you lucky buggers) a Gantt chart is the favorite tool of Project Managers world over. It’s used for mapping out every step of a project and all the related contingencies between those steps. This is what the typical Gantt chart looks like:
That’s pretty much to scale.
Maybe clients like to see them. Makes them comfortable, like someone who speaks your own language in a foreign country. But they just don’t work as internal project management tools. Check out the notes on this image of another typical Gantt chart on Flickr – sums up the whole process nicely I think.
</rant>
What I’m driving at in my own obtuse way is that the best design (and development) is produced by small, nimble, dedicated teams that can communicate directly with each other in a fluid environment. Place a few key and realistic deadlines then work hard, fast and smart towards them. Bloody simple.
Team Size
Keep it small. Some of the worlds best brands, products and web apps have been built by very small teams. This doesn’t mean an agency of 100 people is completely useless (on this account anyway) – some of those same brands and products belong to very large companies like Apple, Amazon & Flickr. If project teams are kept to the bare minimum to produce a result it will almost inevitably be more cohesively realised end product. 7 people +/− 2 should be the sweet spot.
There’s a couple of great post I’ve read lately on design team size by Khoi Vinh of the NY Times and 37 Signals the Basecamp folks. Give them a read, Khoi especially is much more elegant than me on the subject.
Agility
Everyone needs to know what is going on. The trick to making sure this isn’t an overwhelming flow of information is to keep the major goal posts clear and simple – chalked up where everyone can see them everyday – and then allow the small stuff to sort itself in an organic way between team members. For the day-to-day ‘status’ updates something like a distributed Twitter could work very well (drop me a line if you’re interested in this).
What’s makes up that team? Definitely another story.
