Daily Productive Sharing 1202 - How to Run Major Projects

One helpful tip per day:)

At companies like Anthropic, strong project management is a highly leveraged skill—not just during crises but as a fundamental driver of execution. Ben Kuhn shared his experience managing complex projects:

1. Company projects often involve many moving parts, intricate and non-obvious dependencies, and tight deadlines. Organizing the project itself is a major effort—and doing it well can save weeks of delay.
2. During crisis-mode projects, he often clears his schedule entirely to focus on the work, spending over six hours a day organizing tasks.
3. At first glance, project management can seem like mere “information shuffling” rather than real work (like coding). But when you add up everything—running meetings, nudging progress, untangling Slack threads, setting next steps—it’s an extremely time-consuming job.
4. Clearing your schedule isn’t just about freeing up time; it prioritizes the project in your mind, boosting focus and execution.
5. A critical tool is creating a detailed “victory plan”—a concrete checklist of steps leading from the current state to the project goal.
6. Knowing how “good” or “bad” the current status is helps determine when to bring in more resources, cut scope, escalate issues, or flag leadership.
7. One common failure mode in large projects is not realizing something is going wrong early enough—and a clear plan is the best defense against that.
8. While even the best plans can’t eliminate failure (e.g. underestimating timelines), they significantly improve execution efficiency.
9. The OODA framework—Observe, Orient, Decide, Act—emphasizes that plans should constantly evolve in response to new information.
10. In many projects, the hardest part is simply obtaining complete and accurate information.
11. Project timelines are often gated by the speed at which information flows.
12. On large projects, managers often maintain a living document that tracks all unresolved key issues, ranked by priority.
13. Beyond tracking progress, a core management responsibility is re-orienting: constantly reevaluating whether current priorities are still valid, and ensuring the team is solving the most important problems.
14. Ideal task assignments are clear, simple, and tied to a higher-level goal—avoiding overlap with other workstreams.
15. To reduce collaboration friction, strong managers simplify goals down to something that can be clearly communicated in a single Slack message. This allows team members to better judge priorities and stay aligned with the true objective.
16. Simplifying a goal doesn’t mean making it easier—it means uncovering the hidden structure behind it and breaking it down in a way that supports clear and effective teamwork.

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在像 Anthropic 这样的公司，优秀的项目管理是一项极具杠杆性的技能，不仅仅适用于危机时期。Ben Kuhn 分享了他的项目管理经验：

1. 公司的项目通常包含大量动态因素、复杂且不明显的相互依赖关系，以及严格的时间限制。因此，项目组织本身就是一项巨大工程，若处理得当，可节省数周的延误时间。
2. 在处理危机管理项目时，他通常会清空个人日程，专注于该项目，每天花费 6 小时以上来组织各项任务。
3. 乍看之下，项目管理似乎只是信息搬运而非真正的工作（如编码），但如果加总所有内容——主持会议、催促进度、梳理 Slack 线程、制定后续步骤等——会发现这其实是一项极为耗时的任务。
4. 清空日程的更大意义不只是腾出时间，而是让该项目成为大脑中最优先处理的问题，有助于提升集中度与执行力。
5. 一个关键工具是制定详细的胜利计划，也就是一份尽可能具体的步骤清单，从起点引导至目标达成。
6. 了解项目当前状况的好坏十分重要，这有助于判断何时需要寻求更多资源、缩减范围、升级问题或引起高层注意。
7. 大型项目常见的失败模式之一是未能及时警觉，而拥有一份清晰的计划是预防这种状况的最好方式。
8. 尽管详细计划不能完全避免失败（比如低估执行时间），但它无疑能大幅提升推进效率。
9. OODA（观察、定位、决策、行动）框架强调：项目执行过程需不断根据新信息调整计划与行为。
10. 在许多项目中，最困难的往往是获取完整信息。
11. 项目的时间进度通常受限于信息流通速度。
12. 在多数大型项目中，项目管理者会维护一个持续更新的文档，记录所有尚未解决的关键问题，并按照优先级进行排序。
13. 除了获取进展更新之外，管理者的核心工作还包括重新定位——审视当前优先事项是否仍然成立，确保团队正在攻克最关键的问题，而非偏离目标。
14. 理想的任务委派单位是清晰、简单、层级明确的高层目标，尽量避免与其他任务流重叠。
15. 为了降低协作摩擦，优秀的管理者通常会将目标简化到可以通过一条 Slack 消息清晰表达，这样任务执行者更容易自主判断优先级，并指向真正的目标，而非误入歧途。
16. 简化目标并不意味着降低目标本身的难度或影响力，而是通过挖掘任务背后的隐性结构，实现对目标的分解和递归拆解，使团队能更清晰地协作推进。

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