I’ve recently seen a project of four weeks; good / bad? I don’t know; I do have some ideas on how to make it better.
How to make it better?
- People do a lot of talks – “Oh, but I have this idea”; “No, this can’t work”; “Oh, but I have an idea which is better than your idea”; “I have an idea about your both ideas”; and talk and talk; one week later – “Oh, why don’t we go back to the first idea?”; and this seems to take forever and forever; I’d dare to say that a 80% good idea implemented in 90% success is hugely better than a 95% good idea implemented, due to too much talks, only 50% success;
- People don’t act:
- Coming to a meeting is a great point; but it’s certainly not enough;
- X gives an email, asking for a reply; one or two replies, from a group of about 15 people are given; this is considered natural;
- X asks the group to get involved in a project, sometime in the following week; excuse arise; sorry, in a project with 12 participants, a normal rate of “Yes!” to this request (when, anytime in the following week, can you work?) should be about 8-12 people; 2/3 of the people should be, at some point in a week, available for work; this doesn’t happen;
- I have the following rule: if X sends me personally an email and the email has an action item in it, always reply to this email; the project manager failed to apply to this rule, and on the same time still asked his emails to be asked to;
- People don’t know how to handle feed-back; X gives an email, asks for feed-back; I personally gave feed-back to right about everything in the project; the following happened:
- I disagree with your disagreements (you may do, but it isn’t relevant, you should take my feed-back and use it if you like it, ignore it not; don’t hit me; I don’t need explanations and excuses, and need acts; telling me I’m wrong is irrelevant);
- I will mock you and consider your disagreements ridicule (How can you say this about this image of a girl with a large robe?);
- Out of 5 points, I will pick on the most outrageous, and only focus on that one; if a reply is given that the point is really not relevant, people will still insist on this one;
- X gave a logo, I came up with arguments on why the logo was bad; the logo wasn’t remade, based on my suggestions, my feed-back was ignored;
- X gave a logo, I said it was poor due to A, B, C reasons, Y made another logo, ignoring all other A, B, C, reasons and still asking for feed-back; I ignored Y’s request for feed-back;
- In the meeting following my feed-back on email, people didn’t seem to have known my feed-back; why should I still give feed-back on this, if this is ignored?
- Do you know that expert in time estimation? I have a feeling: that expert is wrong; all the people in the project, but I mean all, including me, seemed to have a problem in rightfully estimating how much time will the project take; call it optimism, call it the way you want it, but time management was faulty;
- Afraid of delegation: the idea of the project shouldn’t have been a democracy, 3 people should have come with 3 ideas, and those should have been voted; one person should have come with 3/more logos, and worked on those, based on feed-back; choosing the logo should have been the task of a single person; choosing the slogan should have been the task of the marketing team; that’s it; sure, it’s great to ask the opinion of 15 people for the motto of the project, you will get a 40% better solution, but for the cost of 40% better solution, you will waste the time of the whole team; chose the weaker logo, slogan and idea, but make the project move faster by delegation; democratic feed-back? Yes; democratic decision-making process for a specialist job? No;
- Solution: instead of 4 weeks of preparation for a single project, do 4 one-week, smaller ones – so, instead of a big projects for four weeks, I’d much rather do 4 different projects, one week each; in this way:
- People are very motivated not to postpone an action;
- A lot of ideas will come from practice – “Oh, we did X, now we can do Y faster”;
- It forces people to choose the projects which don’t require a lot of administrative / bureaucratic actions;
- It puts emphasis on action, not on planning; the most active part of the current projects were the meetings, not the action themselves; at the end of the session, what does one become? A meetings expert;
- You have time pressure;
- You understand that once the idea of the project is set, time is too short to change anything;
- People should be much more skilled in correctly understanding what the project of the week is about (no one will forget from one week the idea of the project, while for a 4-week project it’s difficult to remember);
- People form memories and learn better from 4 different actions / settings / plans, than from a big, huge single one;
At the end of the day, the project consisted of lots of meetings, fewer tasks done, fewer feed-back implemented, lots of time wasted on idea focusing; still, it’s a process to learn from; still, good things happened; still, people worked, even if they made mistakes; still, things got done, and friendships were formed; still, the world was changed for the better, not for the worse.