Minimalist Project Manager

The word "minimalism" means "a style or a technique that is characterized by extreme spareness and simplicity". Minimalist is someone who uses 'minimalism' as his style of working. To do a good job of managing a project, a project manager needs a solid work plan. The work plan lays out the tasks and activities that are necessary to achieve milestones during the course of the project. Once the work plan is created, it gets (needs to be) tweaked throughout the life of the project to reflect the current situation and future opportunities or risks. Its very often the case that the project manager keeps track of every single task (in terms of planned and actual completion) to track the progress of the project. This process is usually time consuming. In practice, the project manager should focus on the critical path and the tasks/activities that have a direct correlation to those tasks and activities. In addition, the project manager should share these set of milestones with the core team on a weekly basis to keep them focused on those activities. We know that the critical path changes during the project, so project manager should tweak the tracking accordingly and keep his team focused on the altered critical path. The management of tasks at detailed level does not go away, because the core team will start owning the tasks that contribute to the critical path milestones.
As they say 'don't fix something that's not broken'. The project manager should focus on those exception situations affecting the critical path adversely. This is the role of a minimalist project manager. The minimalist project manager identifies those exception situations, elevates those to the right levels by focusing on those and addressing those swiftly. These may have an impact on critical path, which, the project manager would communicate to the core team and all stakeholders.