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Textbook Communicating Project Management A Participatory Rhetoric For Development Teams Lauren Ebook All Chapter PDF
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COMMUNICATING PROJECT
MANAGEMENT
Rhetoric in the Flesh: Trained Vision, Technical Expertise, and the Gross Anatomy
Lab
T. Kenny Fountain
Social Media in Disaster Response: How Experience Architects Can Build for
Participation
Liza Potts
Benjamin Lauren
First published 2018
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2018 Taylor & Francis
The right of Benjamin Lauren to be identified as the author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or
other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying
and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lauren, Benjamin, author.
Title: Communicating project management / Benjamin Lauren.
Description: 1 Edition. | New York : Routledge, [2018] | Series: ATTW
book series in technical and professional communication
Identifiers: LCCN 2017045381| ISBN 9781138046382 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781138046429 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781315171418 (ebk)
Subjects: LCSH: Project management. | Business communication. |
Leadership.
Classification: LCC HD69.P75 L387 2018 | DDC 658.4/5—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017045381
Typeset in Minion
by Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon
For Liz, Austen, Addie, and Skyler,
who held on until the end
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments viii
Foreword x
Introduction 1
Index 175
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This project began when I was a PhD student at Texas Tech University. While
at Texas Tech I received a great deal of support from Joyce Locke Carter, Steve
Morrison, Chris Andrews, Sam Dragga, Miles Kimball, Becky Rickly, Bea Amaya,
and Kristen Moore (who first introduced me to Pat Sullivan’s work). I would
also like to recognize my committee, Kelli Cargile Cook and Fred Kemp, for their
support of my ideas and for all the feedback along the way. It still resonates. As
well, my dissertation chair, Rich Rice, who invited me to keep reading, thinking,
and writing, while also reminding me to be happy in life—to find a balance and
to always think about my family’s happiness.
I also have to thank my colleagues, friends, and students at MSU (in no specific
order): Bump Halbritter, Julie Lindquist, Lizzie Oderkirk, Chris Long, David
Prestel, John Monberg, Erin Campbell, Liza Potts, Alex Hidalgo, Steve Fraiberg,
Autumn Laws, Jenn Ismirle, Howard Fooksman, April Baker-Bell, Malea Powell,
Dawn Opel, Brooke Chambers, Diana Shank, Regina Boone, Phil Deaton, Gary
Vigil, Barb Miller, Tylor Hoekstra, Scott Schopieray, Kristen Mapes, Jess Knot,
Ryan Yang, Valeria Obando, and Jackie Rhodes. All of these folks offered timely
and useful advice, support, and encouragement. In addition, I am indebted to
Dánielle DeVoss, Bill Hart-Davidson, Stuart Blythe, Mary Litteral, and Jeff
Grabill for reading drafts and giving feedback to the project. Mary Litteral
particularly deserves editorial credit—your feedback was so helpful and needed.
A massive thank you to WRAC and the College of Arts and Letters at MSU for
funding much of this project as well.
I’d also like to thank colleagues in the field who were very supportive of
this project: Michael Salvo, Kirk St. Amant, Joanna Schreiber, Keith Instone,
Peter Merholz, Emily Bowman, Lisa Welchman, Paul Feigenbaum, Emma Rose,
Laura Gonzales, Claire Lauer, Carlton Card, Cheryl Ball, Anna Dematatis, Karen
Acknowledgments ix
Schriver, and Beth Keller. As well, a big thanks to Tharon Howard as editor of
the series/project.
Thank you to all my participants—without you this research would have not
have been possible.
A shout-out is owed to Stacey Pigg for reading and responding to this book
several times throughout the process. Her insight and generosity proved
significant through and through.
The penultimate thank-you goes to my sister and brother, Jaime Lauren and
Tavaris Thomas (the latter for the badly needed slap on the head). And Jaime,
thanks for always being there despite the highs and lows, reminding me to laugh.
Give Rid and Phin a hug.
And last, thank you to Liz, Austen, and Addie for believing in me and
reminding me to believe in myself. You inspire me every day. I truly would not
have finished without your patience, love, and support. You are my everything.
FOREWORD
I began this book asking a deceptively simple question: why does Technical and
Professional Communication and, really, the world, need another book on
project management? After all, there is an abundance of material on project
management across disciplines, and adding another book to that conversation
might be like throwing a handful of sand into the ocean. So much of the
previously published output in technical communication has done a solid job of
walking people through project lifecycles and best practices in managing
documentation teams and communication (for example, Allen & Deming, 1994;
Dicks, 2004; Hackos, 2007). Perhaps those works are now dated, and in some ways
they are, even though they still hold a great deal of value. For this reason, I strongly
considered writing a book that would specifically update this work to make it align
with current practice. For example, a project management book that would teach
technical communicators to work with Agile and Lean development teams. For
a while, that is the book I intended to write. But that solution left me unsettled
because it assumed a relatively positivist stance on Agile and/or Lean. The “why
another book on project management?” question even lingered as I collected data,
analyzed it, and tried to understand the bigger exigence for my research. The
turning point was when I was coding the interviews for Chapter 3 and I identified
the concept of “safe spaces for communication” surfacing in the transcriptions.
I knew that finding was important. Many of the project managers I’d talked to
thought about managing the communication of project work through a lens of
safety. And safety was developed in support of communicating in ways that led
to participation with multiple audiences that have a stake in project work. So that
is how I discovered the answer to my why question.
We need another book on project management because much of the previous
work operates under a big assumption: that project management is about, above
2 Introduction
all, making teams efficient by expertly using tools and processes. However, this
view neglects to position project managers as writers. If we understand project
managers as writers, then we can understand their communication work as
inherently rhetorical because it is situated and context-specific. More, the com-
munication of project managers can be studied as writing, which can help reveal
its embedded values and beliefs as these emerge through practices. So, what
happens when we think about project managers as writers and study them as
writers? Through this book I work to answer these questions, arguing that
effective project managers help make teams efficient because they communicate
in ways that seek to cultivate participation.
Let me explain what I mean by project managers as writers a bit more. Plenty
of scholars in technical communication offer broad views of what constitutes
“writing” (Hart-Davidson, 2001; Schriver, 2012), seemingly agreeing that writing
encompasses assembling words and figures on a screen or page as well as design-
ing visuals like charts and figures. Furthermore, writing is also coordinating
networks of people, designing interfaces, assembling data, or even making grocery
lists. Writing is creating meeting agendas, and writing is also implementing the
agenda through mundane acts such as keeping people on task. Writing is also
following up after a meeting to check on someone’s perception of an interaction.
Writing is all these things, because the communicative act is intentional, designed
to elicit a particular effect and/or response, and purposefully shaped for an
audience or audiences. In this way, most of the work of project management is
writing, but the scholarship tends not to position it that way. That’s what this
book takes on, offering case studies that provide a variety of snapshots of project
managers as writers who are situated in organizational contexts and team cultures.
Please don’t misunderstand, I don’t want to argue that efficiency is unimport-
ant for project management. People are always looking for innovative ways to
be more productive and efficient at work—and that shouldn’t stop. The way our
work lives are structured in the 21st century basically demands efficiency of us.
On the other hand, I do want to put efficiency under a microscope. Efficiency,
in many team situations, is highly dependent on the participation of multiple
people. Effective participation of sometimes disparate audiences is how efficiency
is achieved. In today’s globally distributed and digitally networked workplaces,
understanding that cultivating participation leads to productivity is a fundamental
writing skill. Teams must work fast, most definitely, but they need to commu-
nicate in ways that support involvement across stakeholders and users to achieve
a swift pace. However, we have not investigated the relationship of writing to
participation in the context of project management. Nor have we addressed the
variety of communication used to support participation in the context of project
management.
Aside from the scholarly contribution this book offers, I do have practical
reasons for writing a book on project management. In Technical and Professional
Communication, books on project management are relatively sparse. We’ve
Introduction 3
produced work that informs project management and how people practice it,
but rarely have we made our unit of analysis project management. No doubt this
is what led Stan Dicks (2013, pp. 311–312) to explain, “For an area that is as
critically important to technical communication as project management, it is
surprising that there are not more articles in the literature dedicated to the
subject.” The work that has been published focuses almost entirely on instructing
people how to be project managers; it is practice-oriented without being critical
of the project management methodologies teams adopt. And those methodologies,
sometimes having grown so popular and buzzworthy that they are fetishized,
directly influence how we manage timelines, budgets, workflow, and, most
importantly, people. Surprisingly, this emphasis on practice instead of theory is
also a problem in project management studies in general (see Morris, Pinto, &
Söderlund, 2011). This book looks to fill some of that theoretical space by
repositioning project managers as writers.
Another reason: the published scholarship has not produced little examination
of methodological histories and trajectories and how they influence project team
dynamics. For example, consider popular textbooks (Lannon & Gurak, 2017;
Markel, 2015) and single-authored books (Dicks, 2004; Hackos, 2007; Hamilton,
2009; Schwarzman, 2011) that focus on instructing people on the fundamentals
of managing information development projects and teams. To be clear, I do not
mean to criticize these books, but to point out an important observation that
our field’s interest in project management is preoccupied with knowing how to
do it or best teach others how to embody the role. This focus on doing presents
a theoretical tension, however, because
there has been pressure to better shape the theoretical basis of the subject
and to make project management more relevant to managers, sponsors,
policy-makers, and others concerned with the management of projects,
doing so without diminishing standards of academic rigor.
(Morris et al., 2011, p. 3)
the research cases later in this book. In some instances, the cases focus on the
organizational and team context of user experience while in others the cases occur
in the context of government or healthcare information technology. Each of the
participants, however, are positioned as writers because they engage in project
management activities that require communicative interaction and involvement
with teams, internal and external stakeholders, and so on. As a result, the cases
offer a rich and broad array of writerly experiences and contexts.
Additionally, it would be impossible to study all existing forms of project
management in this book. For instance, it is arguable that content strategy or
translation activities involves a kind of project management, but this book does
not investigate these connections. Furthermore, construction project manage-
ment is very different than managing development and creative teams. In this
research, I am particularly interested in how people communicate and participate
in project management in organizations that develop digital technologies and
services. These organizations are often multinational and employ people all
around the world. Throughout the book, I introduce research participants, their
differing roles, and titles in each chapter, but what unites them is their role as
technical rhetoricians that somehow are involved with managing or co-managing
projects with development teams.
Finally, this is not a “How-To Manage Technical Communication Projects”
book. As stated earlier, my goal is not to instruct readers about the nuts and bolts
of managing projects in technical communication. There are better places to go
for that sort of training. Rather, this book examines how project management
is communicated in the context of development teams, and works to understand
participation in the writing philosophies, strategies, and practices that people and
teams use. While I believe readers will find the results of this work instructive
and the cases presented valuable for thinking about project management and how
to practice it, this book’s primary focus is on offering a critical, humanist
perspective to managing projects—an area where writing studies excels. That said,
I would like to note that to balance research and practice, I do work to include
takeaways for practitioners in each chapter. While this is not a book focused only
on instruction, I do hope there are practical takeaways for all readers.
business of our music. One phone call would be with someone from our
management or record label, while the next would be with a radio station. Often,
after greeting fans before a show, I would be called to a meeting with our
management team to talk over an unexpected development that suddenly needed
to be problem-solved. An important part of my role as the leader was to facilitate
communication across different groups (i.e., the label, the management team,
the band, the radio stations, the producer, and the fans). Complicating things,
these groups were often distributed across wide swaths of space, and had
different—oftentimes diverging—motivations, histories with each other, and in-
the-moment exigencies. At the time, I didn’t think of myself as a project manager,
but I was one. And like many project managers, I felt as if I was making it up
(and messing it up) as I went along. I knew all of these groups were involved in
some way with the band, but I wasn’t always sure how I could persuade them to
participate with each other effectively.
As a (former) musician, I also understand managing project teams as similar
to participating in a jam session. Musicians riff off each other. People have roles,
yes, but when the guitarist begins a solo, everyone else understands it is time to
step back into more of a support role. Musicians do this by listening for subtle
communicative clues. For example, a cadence one person plays may lead to a
hand-off from the guitarist to the horn player. Or, someone may signal a hand-
off through a kind of phrasing that resolves musically, inviting the next person
to step in and play. Jam sessions have very clear rules (keys, timing, space) that
musicians internalize and understand, so they don’t have to stop playing to remind
someone, “hey, follow the rules!” In the context of project management, Demarco
and Lister (2013) describe this phenomenon as jelling, explaining, “Jelled teams
are usually marked by a strong sense of identity” (p. 136). Experienced musicians
jell by reading and reacting in the moment to where the music is leading and
following along by actively listening to each other. Listening is one essential way
bands support participation in playing music. Without the right kinds of
participation, there is no music. I think project management works in comparable
ways.
A second professional experience grew out of my time working as the
coordinator of a media lab in an English Department early on in my career. In
this position, I was responsible for managing the role of the lab in supporting
projects. If being a musician taught me about the importance of jelling as a team,
then coordinating the media lab taught me important lessons about the role
of environment (emotional and physical) in doing project work. To be useful to
other instructors, the media lab had to be a flexible environment. If an instructor
designed a project that required our support, I had to arrange the environment
to align with that specific assignment. In practice, that meant there was very little
static space in the lab. Every project that came in the door was different, and
required something different from me and from the lab. One day I might be
facilitating an audio recording session where students were remixing previously
Introduction 9
developed work for a new genre. The next day I might be helping students finish
an interactive mapping project. I came to understand that different kinds of
facilitation required varied communication strategies and practices that had to
be applied and adapted to different situations.
The work of facilitating communication as a musician and in the media lab
made jelling and the role of the environment important considerations for me
as a scholar of project management. These experiences especially showed me how
communication helped build the kinds of relationships essential to doing the work.
To make sense of these experiences today, I turn to research on the importance
of psychological safety on teams (Edmondson, 1999) and distributed cognition
(Hutchins, 1995). As people work and take risks, teams tend to succeed more
often when the work environment is a kind of safe space, where risk-taking,
pitching ideas, and learning can occur publicly without harming individual
credibility or reputation. Structures must be developed for this kind of participa-
tion to productively occur. Additionally, Edmondson (1999) demonstrates
the role of effective coaching in helping teams develop psychological safety,
particularly through facilitating internal communication about work processes
and procedures. In other words, facilitating psychological safety seems to be
systemic and structural. Managing team dynamics amid workplace systems
and structures is an important role many project managers must fulfill. My view
of psychological safety is that project managers support it through effective com-
munication—through activities that help teams and audiences jell. I do recognize
this is a relatively egalitarian view of collaboration and teamwork that is not
necessarily always practical or efficient. I’d counter, however, that project
management is already a social activity, and that sometimes the inefficiency of
social participation is actually the most efficient path forward.
Terms
So far, I have deployed a number of terms without explaining them in more depth.
In this section I preview a discussion of the terms I will use and refer to through-
out this book. While many of the coming chapters will explain many of these
terms in depth and practice, I introduce them here to make sure readers
understand how I deploy and position each one.
Project
I understand a project as containing both technical and human elements (Levin,
2010). The technical elements include activities like estimating, scheduling,
and budgeting. The human elements consist of the interpersonal dynamics that
exist across teams of people or even just a single person. In addition, I also
understand projects as being a unique work situation that exists over a clearly
defined period of time. According to The Project Management Body of Knowledge,
10 Introduction
Project Manager
When I refer to project managers, project leaders, or project management, I am
referring to what Scott Berkun (2008) called “project management activities.”
Project management activities are made up of both the technical and human work
that individuals and teams do across a project lifecycle. Berkun noted that the
role and responsibilities of project managers, just like project management,
is often tied to an organization. As a result, sometimes there is one person in
the role of project manager and sometimes project management activities are
shared across a team, as Spinuzzi (2015) described. Due to the influence of
development models like Agile and Lean, many organizations hire Scrum
Masters, Agile Coaches, and so on, in lieu of a de facto project manager. Still, in
other organizations, no project manager exists. Instead, a digital management
system (such as a ticketing system) is the engine of project management. People
on the team are responsible for taking the lead at different times when/if needed.
In these situations, project leadership has more to do with an individual’s
specialization and how it complements a project or a problem than it does with
that person’s title.
Efficiency Models
Efficiency models are approaches to managing projects that intentionally seek to
eliminate waste and implement workflows that emphasize individuals, team, and
organizational productivity. Joanna Schreiber (2017) explained, “I use efficiency
management philosophies as an umbrella term to include philosophies, methods,
models, and frameworks focused managing people, resources, and projects in
terms of quality and/or speed” (p. 27). Historically, efficiency models were
developed to support the management of factories (e.g., Taylorism and Fordism).
Over time, efficiency models were adopted by managers in a variety of business
roles (Saval, 2014), including in the development of Lean (Gothelf & Seiden, 2013),
Introduction 11
Six Sigma (George, Rowlands, Price, & Maxey, 2005), and Agile (Ratcliffe &
McNeill, 2012). Efficiency models exist under a scientific management paradigm
that has continued to be used to guide the activities of project management. For
example, Gantt charts—still used by many teams and project management
systems today—were introduced to help track progress and productivity (Gantt,
1903).
Development Teams
When I refer to development teams, I mean cross-functional teams that work in
tandem to solve problems for people by developing products, services, and
experiences. My definition of a development team is purposefully broad as a
means to include a range of people across disciplines who may participate in
project management activities. Some have referred to these kinds of teams
as creative teams (Brown, 2009). Others refer to them as cross-functional. As noted
previously, development teams can self-organize or have a designated project
manager (Berkun, 2008). In some organizational structures and situations,
development teams share in project management activities (Spinuzzi, 2015) as
a means for moving quickly to solve problems.
Decentralization
As a management phenomenon, decentralization is when decision-making and
control are delegated to other groups and people in an organization. While
Chapter 1 will describe decentralization in more depth, it is important to note
that when I refer to decentralization I am invoking the history of scaling organiza-
tional management (Yates, 1989), which introduces a spatial consideration to
development work. By spatial consideration, I mean how work is organized
internally at a company (e.g., Marketing handles promotional materials and
Human Resources hires and fires), but also where work occurs as many
organizations expand and add offices and workers across the world. In Yates’s
work, management activities, including decision-making and controlling, were
assigned to different parts of organizations as the business (or in this case, the
railroad) grew and became disbursed. When I discuss decentralization, I am
also referring to the current practice of self-organizing teams like we’ve seen
depicted in recent scholarship in technical communication (Spinuzzi, 2015).
Sometimes these teams are geographically disbursed, and other times they are
collocated, using workplace networks to communicate. These teams often have
some decision-making capabilities so that they can work faster. As well, decen-
tralized teams may use elements of Agile and Lean development methodologies,
which influence how they manage projects. Decentralized teams tend to engage
in project management activities together, with people taking the lead at different
times when/if needed.
12 Introduction
Participation
Johnson (1997) called our attention to “the audience involved” because they are
“an actual participant in the writing process who creates knowledge and
determines much of the content of the discourse” (p. 363, emphasis in original).
Johnson’s conception of involvement is closer to Participatory Action Researcher
Alice McIntyre’s (2008, p. 15) idea that true participation in projects is reliant
upon a sense of ownership over the work. McIntyre also suggests that effective
participation should be defined by the community where work is being done. In
the context of civic participation, Stave (2002) complicates this discussion by
arguing that the mechanisms used for involving people in decision-making are
what matter most, but the systems usually in place are not effective. She explained
what I suspect is true of many project managers who work to communicate
in ways that facilitate participation across multiple audiences, “We know what
we need to do; we just do not have good mechanisms for achieving it” (p. 142).
In this book, participation refers to all the audiences working with a project team
(including internal and external stakeholders), not necessarily a group of end users
dictating individual needs or technological requirements to the team. As noted
earlier in this Introduction, participation should not be compared to collabo-
ration, as coordinating participation represents a different communication
need in the context of project work. Also, participation as I conceive it no doubt
has a conceptual history in Scandinavian Design and Participatory Design
(Kensing & Greenbaum, 2013), and in Lawler’s (1986) work in high-involvement
management, but deviates from these traditions by specifically focusing on
project management in networked organizations.
Participatory Communication
When I refer to participatory communication, I mean composed exchanges and
interactions, serendipitous and improvised, between networked actors in the
workplace. As well, when I refer to participatory communication I also mean
exchanges or interactions that are intentional. In other words, actors that inter-
act with other actors purposefully, and with specific logics and with particular
goals in mind. There are several potential uses for a communication, such as
persuasion, sharing information, or coordinating work. Additionally, participa-
tory communication depends on the social coordination that Stacey Pigg (2014)
described as literate activity. That is, the ways in which people coordinate infor-
mation and work across personal and professional networks. In this way, I view
participatory communication as networked and relational.
In Chapter 3, I explain three overlapping concepts that characterize partici-
patory communication. Here I introduce these elements as a preview. The first
is that communication is reactive and intentional. By that I mean people often
read (analyze) and respond (compose a purposeful message) to a given situation.
Introduction 13
Organization
In this book, organizations are made up of multiple human and nonhuman
networks. Spinuzzi (2015) describes organizational networks operating as a kind
of adhocracy supported, in part, by information communication technologies.
Additionally, he explains these organizational networks as nonhierarchical,
temporary, flexible, and, as a result, adaptive. To illustrate, workers are not always
connected by bureaucracy, but by a nonhierarchical network of ties often
maintained and sustained by information communication technologies. In
organizational networks, “individuals coordinate their own work, by commun-
icating informally with each other” (Mintzberg, 1980, p. 324).
Central to the concept of organizational networks is networked individualism.
Networked individualism is a “social operating system,” which can be contrasted
with “the longstanding operating system formed around large hierarchical
bureaucracies and small, densely knit groups such as households, communities,
and workgroups” (Rainie & Wellman, 2012, Chapter 1, Section 2, para. 2). The
networked individual operates from the center of their own network that they
maintain and sustain by multitasking and simultaneously communicating
with multiple people across different conversations (Rainie & Wellman, 2012,
Chapter 1, Section 2, para. 2). Networked individuals use information communi-
cation technologies to exchange information with others and coordinate work
in ways that supports mutual adjustment.
purposes, although, following the recommendation of Yin (2009), the results were
analyzed broadly across cases.
The first case asked how do project managers and leaders talk about their
communication practices, strategies, and philosophies. To answer this question,
I arranged interviews with 14 participants (seven men and seven women) that
identified in some way as a project manager or leader. Upon completion, the
interviews were transcribed and coded. As mentioned earlier in this chapter,
an important point discovered across the interviews was that communication
was discussed in terms of safety. Although the participants I spoke with did think
a great deal about communication, they did not often reflect on it as a set of
integrated practices. They reflected on unexpected situations and circumstances
that were unexpected. Yet, many of the participants were able to name certain
moves or strategies previously used to create safety, but when asked for a guiding
philosophy, they struggled to come up with an overarching framework of their
own. The interviews also produced an essential concept of Chapter 4, which is
the importance of making space for people to participate in project management.
The second case focused on how two people experienced communication as
they managed projects in the moment. A common notion reported during the
first case study is how workplace communication is often situational, so a more
thorough examination of how people make decisions on-site was the focus of
the second case. When designing the second case, I recruited two participants
from the first case to participate in experience sampling, or a diary study, which
focused on certain communication events at work as they managed projects. Each
week we discussed the reports that were filed in an interview session. Through
this work I learned the role of leadership philosophy in approach to participatory
communication.
The final case describes a team at a multinational software development com-
pany as they adopt a change in workflow, and how it influences their perception
of safety. The team struggled through a workflow reorganization that suggested
new methods (e.g., journey mapping) and methodologies of working (e.g.,
Design Thinking) and new information communication technologies meant to
support this work in participatory ways. This case explains the disruptions and
contradictions the team faced, noting especially how participation can be
challenging to arrange, sustain, and maintain. The case also ties together results
related to safety uncovered in Case 1 and Case 2. As the concluding case study
in the book, its results support and round out the discussion of the role of parti-
cipation to balance efficiency in project management.
What Is to Come
In the first chapter I describe a trajectory of decentralization and its influence
on project management. To do so, I discuss decentralization in the context of
organizations, development teams, development methodologies, project manage-
ment activities, and communication. The chapter explains how decentralization
has made it possible for teams to move more quickly and self-organize. As well,
the chapter explains the ways in which decentralization has shaped the work of
project management and project communication in meaningful ways. Decentral-
ization is an important context for participation as an exigence of communicating
project work in today’s development teams.
The second chapter frames a central concept in the book: participation. I argue
that project management is in the midst of a paradigm shift from an efficiency
model to a participative approach. To support this argument, I provide examples
of efficiency models in project management and explain how these approaches
now rely on communicating to gain the participation of teams and stakeholders
connected by an organizational network. In this view, efficiency and productivity
are outcomes of participation instead of the other way around. Furthermore,
the chapter argues that project management is a system and a methodology
for working that must be adapted to teams. I end the chapter introducing a parti-
cipative approach for communicating project management.
The third chapter argues that making space is an essential communication
concern of sharing in project management based on the results of the first case
study. By making space, I argue that project managers communicate to extend
a symbolic invitation to participate in project work. The invitation serves as an
opportunity for people to exercise agency. The case assembles the themes of the
interviews into factors project managers consider when making space as work-
place writers, and the strategies they use to invite teams and stakeholders to
participate in project work.
In the fourth chapter, I describe the role of leadership values in shaping com-
munication practices and strategies. To do so, I focus on two metaphors used to
describe project management: gardening and cooking,2 and describe the values
of each leadership approach. The chapter forwards the argument that leadership
identity relies on a project manager’s positionality on their team and in their
organization. Furthermore, I argue that project management leadership is a
rhetorical performance that relies on engagement from teams to be effective.
The fifth chapter demonstrates how participation works across a development
team that is managing a large-scale change project. Through focusing on the team’s
16 Introduction
workflow, readers get a sense of the disruptions and contradictions that surface
in a participative framework. The research presented in this chapter also builds
off the cases in the previous chapters to demonstrate how participation is essential
to managing change. An important takeaway from this chapter is that disruptions
in workflow can prove productive if they lead to participation and improved
efficiency.
The final chapter, Chapter 6, summarizes the chapters of the book and offers
a rhetorical framework for the communication strategies and practices discovered
within and across each case study. The chapter discusses the role of agency and
kairos in communicating project management and explains the importance of
communication aims that focus on coordination genres in participatory
frameworks. As such, the takeaways in this chapter are particularly noteworthy
for practitioners and instructors of technical communication.
Conclusion
The goal for this Introduction was to introduce this book. Specifically, I explained
the motivation for writing this book—to better understand and theorize
the relationship between efficiency and participation. I also introduced the con-
nection of my work to technical communication, noting that project management
is a form of technical communication. I also explained how I relate to the topic
of project management, particularly highlighting the importance of team jelling
and the influence of the physical and emotional environment on project work.
Then I reviewed important terms and situated them in the literature of project
management and technical communication. After reviewing the research in this
book, I also previewed the chapters to come.
While there will be more substantial takeaways for practitioners in future
chapters of this book, in this first chapter I hope it was clear that project managers
often work as technical communicators. That is, project managers work within
information and make it accessible to people who need to use it. As a result, it
is important to understand the work of project management as audience-
involved, and that those who are leaders understand their role as “technical
rhetoricians” (Johnson-Eilola, 2005). This view of project management is key to
balance its focus on efficiency with participation because it gives presence to the
human elements of managing projects.
In the next chapter I begin with a question: how did participation become so
important to managing projects for development teams? To answer this question,
I explain how decentralization, a process key to scaling organizations, plays an
important role in how people participate in project management. As such, I
assemble histories of decentralization and its influence on organizations, teams,
project management methodologies, and communication.
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Zwanzigstes Kapitel.