Design patterns for multi-organization project management
Recently, I needed to help plan a project that spanned across dozens of teams, as wel as product areas and VPs. My task was planning my team’s deliverables, but to do so, there were multiple pieces of information that one had to consider, including:
The process was quite taxing, resulting in quarterly planning where we had to dig up all the context from previous quarters, find outdated docs, and go through a multi-day effort to get this information presentable to the senior leadership team.
From that, I’ve been working on some patterns and processes, built on our existing project management tooling, make it easier to produce these roadmaps and extract information.
I left this blog post conceptual intentionally: it’s because these are design patterns: ideas that can, for the most part, be applied to any issue tracking tool (Jira, Smartsheet, an in-house tracker).
Although a custom tracker may be written for this purpose, I think that these ideas are actually more useful as design patterns. Organizations almost always have decided on their project tracker of choice, and it’s impractical, if not infeasible, to replace that with a bespoke solution.
