Ideas for developing a more democratic project management practice.

• Teach your team valuable scripts to reset relationships with clients or execs so they can speak directly with them
• Alternate who takes meeting notes
• Involve your team in the scoping process
• Involve your team in the estimation process
• Don’t sell work that the team hasn’t gut checked
• Don’t hide your actual slowdowns: exposes the gaps in hiring and hyper productivity
• Stop prioritizing other people’s checklists
• Try to think of shared positive risk and give people autonomy to help realize those risks
• Involve clients in retrospectives
• Do more frequent retrospectives
• Stop time tracking
• Do a financial literacy workshop to teach teammates which metrics/drivers they can support
• Stop utilization tracking and work in time blocks instead (bill related to days or weeks or months, not hours)
• Hire and train up junior PMs who can support projects
• Check your project management hiring process and evaluations for inherent bias
• Adopt a modern Agile approach that protects safety, and puts people ahead of process
• Four day work weeks
• Build safety into team conversations—actively support teammates who are talked over, ignored, and consistently misinterpreted. Demonstrate democratic, supportive conversations.