The Cantilever Handbook
The Cantilever Handbook

Project Management Rituals

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Cantilever staff can see examples of this process here:

Running a project involves some recurring practices that are common to any project.

Weekly

The PM on each active project should be completing a cleanup and reporting process once a week for each project they manage. This should happen after the weekly sprint meeting on Wednesdays.

The process should include:

  1. Going through the relevant Asana project(s). Ensuring that all the tasks are still in the right sections, have the right assignees, are assigned to the right locations within the sprint lifecycle, etc. Key checks:
    1. Are all tasks that are supposed to be in the current sprint actually in the current sprint project?
    2. Are tasks required for the next sprint added to the sprint backlog?
    3. Are there strategy or PM tasks that are behind? Are there any that need deadlines to ensure we are ready for the next sprint?
    4. Are there tasks that are drifting?
    5. Are tasks in the right sections within each project, and are they ordered in a way that is intuitive and clean?
  2. Cleaning up any anomalies or issues immediately
    1. For example, if an unclarified task somehow made its way into the sprint, make sure there is a clarification task for it.
    2. If a task required quickly was not in the sprint yet, request addition with the sprint owner
    3. If a task was in the sprint but not assigned, figure out an appropriate assignee.
  3. Providing a weekly internal report via the Asana “Status”. The nature of this report should be different on new sprint weeks vs. mid-sprint weeks.
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    On a new sprint week, the weekly update should be a “Sprint Kickoff” for that project’s work within the sprint. It should provide a recap of how we did for that project during the last sprint, and an outline of what is planned for the new sprint.

    On a mid-sprint week, the weekly update should be a “Mid-Sprint Report” instead. This should focus on the current status of the sprint, what we might need to adjust to finish all the work on time, plus should have notes on what are starting to plan for the next sprint.

    In both cases the report should include a comprehensive outline of hours used vs relevant budgets.

  4. Providing a weekly client report. This should include the same information as the internal report, but tailored to a client audience. Remove any in-house chatter/notes/planning, and add more context that matters to the client. Change wording to be less technical and more approachable. The client report should be sent via the client’s preferred communication medium, be that Slack, Email, or someday perhaps a private Asana project.

Billing Notes

This is a little wonky and we might want to change it, but right now #1 and #2 would be considered project management and therefore billed in Planned Maintenance, while #3 and #4 are explicitly a part of the Core Coverage and are therefore billed as Strategy even though they are typically done by a PM.

Monthly

  • Invoice the client and make sure that all invoiced hours are marked as such in Harvest.
  • Review the , and entries for the client for accuracy and currency.