I asked Mick Campbell, MBA is co-founder and Managing Partner of OPPM International (The New One-Page Project Manager: Communicate and Manage Any Project With A Single Sheet of Paper) that question in a past podcast.
Related Podcast and Transcript: Easy, Not Simple Project Management
Joe: Has anyone ever claimed that there is too much information on a page?
Mick: That’s an interesting conversation. I recall a wonderful, in-depth conversation with a friend of mine at Texas Instruments whom I’ve come to know. He talked about using the OPPM as a front door step, as a boiler plate. As something that would draw in attention and then he wanted to have cells that you could click and find a litany of data in and behind that. That is as you would expect, because he is a detail oriented person.
One of the best thinkers and probably most successful project management writers, a gentleman by the name of Harold Kerzner has talked about an idea that we like and use, and he mentions it in some praise for some of our books. That executives, those who are making decisions have so much information to look at, and we, ourselves, we’ve got hundreds of web sites, we have multiple news publications, who know how many cable stations or satellite stations we have at our disposal, how many e-mail accounts you manage personally. We are inundated with information and so, how do we parse through that?
The idea being that when he goes out and does some things he causes that people write up a report, and invariably it is multiple pages and people have beautiful documentation that accompanies it, at the end of that he throws all this away to make a singular statement that I’ll share with everyone. I love this statement. I think it’s applicable to your comment about too much information on one page.
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He says that if there is a paper clip around it or a staple through it they won’t read it. So, we took that and applied it directly to our thinking, saying that you can’t choose or scrunch down your fonts size, you’ve got to keep it legible, and that, actually, for most of us who are detail oriented, which many people in the project world are, that becomes quite a bit of a struggle. In fact, when we’re out talking about the One-Page Project Manager that is sometimes the hardest thing for people to do is to try to determine how much information they’re going to put and what information is salient.