The Schedule Should Move as Fast as the Work: Creator’s Note

I was debating whether these articles should sound a little academic, especially after citing papers.

I initially wanted to build an incentive machine for project management. The whole premise for this product was: if delayed communication costs, why hasn’t anyone built something that solves that? After surfing through actual scenarios, I came to realize that trying to devise incentives that reduce information latency is not only difficult, but also only part of the problem. Scattered communication is probably the larger half of the cost pie for most.

Hence, Bengt Holmström’s genius: allocation of attention and effort. Incentives are only a tool.

Novus uses time as the aggregate statistic sufficient for optimal project management. Which is why everything is in one place: where people communicate, panel boards specifically designed for your attention and to decide where to place your efforts next, and a schedule that can move just as fast.

Additionally, visibility rules place an ownership structure to the schedule; this way, the schedule no longer has to belong to one, two, or three people, but every member can see the work relevant to them. After that, they can also decide what to focus on.

And the benefits aren’t only downstream. The master schedule can stay updated after a hundred different changes. A schedule that moves just as fast means schedule updates can be made with a single Status message.

That’s it. What I took from organizational management theory (Moral Hazard and Observability, Aggregation and Linearity in the Provision of Intertemporal Incentives, and Multitask Principal-Agent Analyses: Incentive Contracts, Asset Ownership, and Job Design) condensed into a single product. I hope it solves what it tries to.