I’m not a good liar. I don’t enjoy it, although I seem to be good at it when the need has arisen. Games like Werewolf frankly make me sick to my stomach and I play up how much I don’t want to lie as a mechanic for when I do have to lie in those games. However, in two areas of my life, I lie my ass off: facilitation and program management. But I only lie about one thing in both of these contexts: time.

Most people need to feel a sense of urgency in order to get anything done, and also a sense of spaciousness to really be thoughtful about outcomes. Both of these are necessary to facilitate a good conversation, and both are necessary to help guide a project well. It’s a balance navigated with nuance, intuition, and experience.

For a contract recently, I was brought on to do a needs assessment, tool selection, and roll-out plan. I have a great deal of admiration for the organization, Calyx Institute, and I’m so pleased to have gotten to work with them. They have both a nonprofit board AND a union, so you can just imagine the complexities of decision making in this environment. Which gets me excited, if you can guess. I brought my best self, and folks responded with vulnerability, honesty, and a willingness to show up.

From our time together, I put together a project plan for them. But because project management is going through transformation in this organization, I also wanted to equip the person taking on sprint planning and reporting to leadership the ability to understand how things were actually likely to go. So I made a little hidden dashboard for them as well.

Airtable wasn’t perfect at this, but it did allow me to do all the reporting and simplified views I wanted for this crew. There are tools that are better for tracking projects, but not necessarily for reporting on the things that I have come to care about.

I estimated 45-58 hours for this contract and landed it in 54. I am good about lying to other people about time in part because I’m so good at understanding how much time things actually are likely to take. *Brushes shoulders*