Philip Fort highlights the pitfalls of project management today: endless status chasing, overcomplex tools, and the need to prioritize simplicity and strategy.
"More information doesn't mean good information," observes Philip Fort, a veteran digital product strategist with over 20 years of experience in agency and enterprise environments. "When everything's a priority, nothing gets done right."
For many project managers today, the role has devolved into a constant chase for status updates across an ever-expanding array of communication channels. Fort has a colorful name for this problem: "the snow cone of shit" – where information piles up faster than anyone can meaningfully process it.
The transition from traditional project management to today's fast-paced digital environment hasn't been entirely positive. "It's funny, we did this better 20 years ago," Fort reflects. "There was just a status sheet and people filled it out at the end of the day. This is what I did today, this is what I did yesterday, this is what we got to do tomorrow."
Today's reality is far more complex. Modern tools promise efficiency but often deliver confusion. "It gives people the appearance of project management when it doesn't really exist," Fort notes about popular project management platforms. "It paints a much more complicated picture than it needs to be."
Fort identifies two distinct approaches to project management: reactive and proactive. "There's the reactive, where you're just chasing people and kind of just really doing status updates. And then when you can be proactive – that's where I'm ahead of things, setting things and making sure they were done and mitigating risk along the way."
The key to proactive management? "I think when you can properly plan and have your alternative plans if necessary, that's when you feel comfortable and everything is moving forward," Fort explains. "When I felt the most successful, I was one step ahead of my team where I'm able to connect the dots." Without this forward-thinking approach, he notes, "what happens in the morning, by the end of the day it's all gone to shit."
Fort's metaphor for effective project management is revealing: "There's a hub of the wheel and project management in the middle, and you have a lot of different spokes... you're shooting it around and it's going to take some experience to get there."
This role as a central hub becomes even more critical when managing cross-functional teams. "Engineers and creatives are both speaking English, but they're speaking different types of English," Fort notes. "So I'll translate from creative to engineering."
Despite the complexity of modern tools, Fort advocates for simplicity: "To me, what I really need is just here are the five things that need to get done today and this is who's going to do it. And everyone just focused on this."
This focus on fundamentals extends to resource allocation: "If I know I have 10 tasks, I'll plan it out for the week and assign hours to it. If things are just getting thrown out without really any sort of concept, then work is just getting done when people feel they want to get to it."
Technology and automation should support project managers, not replace their critical thinking and relationship-building capabilities. "Data says do this, data says do that, which is fine," Fort notes. "But I kind of look at it like a baseball coach now. A baseball coach really isn't setting the order – that's all analytics driven. But you still got to manage your team, put people in a position to succeed."
For project managers looking to evolve beyond status chasing, Fort recommends:
"None of this is that hard," Fort emphasizes. "It's just people aren't in a position to succeed and you might not be either. So it's taking a step back and making sure that people are assigned in the right way and people doing the right things and have the amount of time to do it."
The future of project management demands an intelligent balance: automation to handle routine tasks, while project managers focus on the human connections and strategic decisions that truly drive successful outcomes.
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