Notion Projects: ad-hoc features for agile teams

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Jun 9

Project management helps knowledge-based teams organize, manage, and maintain alignment on their responsibilities. Knowledge is abstract and unclear. The tasks to perform in a knowledge-based project and organization can be abstract and unclear. A project management system opens the possibility of alignment and clear responsibilities across teams and the whole organization, no matter its size.

The ultimate component of a project management system is tasks. These are actionable items with a responsible individual and a deadline. An actionable item removes the analysis paralysis that can come when you are faced with an abstract project or objective and don’t know how to proceed. A responsible individual ensures accountability, which is an essential factor when working in teams to orderly make progress on a project, similar to a military troop attacking an opponent. A deadline is often manufactured by the responsible individual or the project manager, and it can be most useful because, without a deadline, human action is less likely. Parkinson’s law is a valuable mental model in this area: a task expands to fill the time allocated to it.

In the Scrum method (derived from the Agile manifesto) of project management, particularly applied in the software development ecosystem, there are three fundamental components to a project management system: projects, sprints, and tasks. Projects are objectives with specific start and end dates. Sprints are milestones lasting 1 week to 1 month, during which teams work on specific tasks to advance a project. One project can have multiple sprints. Each sprint has multiple tasks. A sprint is organized well in advance in order to set a purpose and clear responsibilities. Sprints are also reviewed once they end as a form of reflection and constant improvement on the methods and frameworks applied. Learn more about Scrum here.

Notion Projects is a pre-packaged Notion template offering the foundations of an Agile project management system in Notion. You can find it in the Templates section at the bottom left corner of your sidebar menu in Notion. It is composed of databases, pages, and blocks (the essential primitives of Notion), plus a few out-of-the-box customizations that are only available in this Project Management template and not as primitive components in Notion for all users. These unique elements include a database property synced with Github Pull Requests, and a database button to mark a sprint as complete, giving you the option to move all incomplete tasks to the next sprint or keep them incomplete in their original sprint.

These are the only customizations in this Notion Projects template as of June 2023. All the other functionalities are the same. You can create pages, properties, database templates, leave comments, or use the slash command creatively.

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