How To Know If Your Project Is Broken And 3 Ways To Fix It
When faced with a workload, there are basically 3 ways to address it.
You can slash tasks and agree to get less done.You can increase your capacity to do the tasks, which may mean hiring people and taking on overhead costs.You can automate and streamline processes to make work with existing resources get done faster.Thats it.
When facing crises, this might mean the stakes are high.
If that’s true, you may need to involve stakeholders to “pick your poison.”If you can’t hire more people and if you can’t decrease the workload, you’re going to have to increase speed or work extra hours to get it done.
This means your project might be broken!
If you’re working extra hours, something is broken.If your work requires heroism or martyrdom to get finished on a regular basis, your project is broken!
2 Minute Action
Take your pick of these three options. You may fine that a hybrid method works, too—using two or all three at the same time.Reply here with your hunch and let me know how you plan to execute!
You Might Be Delusional, Here’s How
Have you ever heard “if you can believe than you can achieve?”How about “if you can dream it you can do it?”In these cases, belief is actually just a combination of trust and visibility.
Let me explain:
Trust is the reputation you have with yourself for executing things.If you have executed, followed through, and challenged yourself in the past you will trust yourself to do so in the future.Visibility is what you can see about the work to be done ahead.Even if you can’t see the ending, have you done something similar or even just not seen the ending before?How clearly can you define your dream?Example: “disrupt the real estate industry” isn’t clear enough.If you don’t know where you want to go, there’s no way to know when you’ve arrivedBasically . . .
It helps if you know what to do and how to do it.
But even more important is the relationship you have with your own execution and whether or not you trust yourself to follow through or figure out the unknown.
Unbounded belief is delusion.
Delusion is when you believe and believe, with abandon, no matter what the world around them is telling them.So, believing in yourself means having the data log of many, smaller decisions and actions that prove that you are capable of bigger ones.Delusion is when you have no behavioral evidence but believing anyway.See the difference?
2 Minute Action
Do you trust your ability to execute?If so, great! Can you name some projects that would prove this?Having the data in hand will drive up your confidence, today.If you don’t trust yourself, take this time to break your most essential project down into a few chunks you can accomplish this week and ask a good friend of yours to hold you accountable. You’ll need to know a bit about what the final product looks like if you’re going to break it down, too.Example:I have a friend who wrote a check for $1000 and said: “cash this check if I don’t stick to my plan.”People who excel set up their environments to give them the best chance of success.
How To Plan
Plan for reality
Well, what does that mean?Here's a list to get straight to the point:
- Define “done”
- Prioritize the work based on value to the project
- The map is not the terrain
- The plan is always wrong, A.K.A. your Gantt Chart
- Don’t plan years in advance, just enough to keep your teams at capacity
- Size things relative to what you know
- Get serious about logical fallacies to avoid groupthink, etc.
- Stop using "I think how much time this will take" and start using a point system to estimate tasks
- Humans think in narratives. Think of who, then why, then what
- Religiously measure project velocity
- Shoot first, measure results second, adjust third
When you get more in touch with what's real, you get more in touch with what works.
2 Minute Action:
Congrats on having a project.Now make a list of everything that will go wrong.Now estimate the likelihood of the 3 biggest risks.What might you do to mitigate?Now you're more ready for reality.