There is truly nothing as frustrating as not ‘getting anywhere.’ To have a project in your business or in your personal life that seems like nothing has gotten better or changed will cause you to lose interest so quickly.
Sadly, the world today is plagued by projects that are over budget, behind schedule, and are under-delivering
Sadly, the world today is plagued by projects that are over budget, behind schedule, and are under-delivering. About five years ago, I bought a fixer upper house. I enlisted the help of my father who was a contractor for several years and together we came up with an estimate for the total cost and guessed the time it would take to get the house livable for me would be less than two years. Today, we sit at more than double my projected budget and three years behind schedule.
Projects often go this way and it can really hurt an organization. Numerous excellent books offer strategies to minimize project drifts, and exploring these, as we often do in the Mainspring Book Club, can significantly benefit your project management skills. Yet, though many people will become incredible project managers by reading SCRUM or How BIG Things get Done, why do others that read the same books fail to turn their projects around, or fail to prevent their projects from getting way off track?
I believe that understanding the ‘why’ behind what you learn is crucial; without it, knowledge alone will not lead to success. Spoiler alert, ‘because your boss wants you to’ and ‘to keep my job’ are very poor ‘Why’ reasons.
Knowledge alone will not lead to success.
It is no secret that the project management books often advocate for a model that requires the person running the big project to be able to demonstrate the progress that has been made at regular intervals. SCRUM advocates for to be split into blocks called sprints which is what we have adhered to at TMG. I don’t have time in this post to go into all the benefits of project owners and stake holders seeing progress at such regular intervals, it is a little beyond the scope. But there are many benefits and I think that one of the most important is that it helps everyone involved to understand the progress being made, even if they have not felt it themselves.
Continuous Visible Progress means the progress being made towards the goal is tangible
This idea was so important to us at Mainspring that it was a core value from the beginning. Continuous Visible Progress means the progress being made towards the goal is tangible. Many project managers out there will take up a project, disappear for a couple months then return to under deliver, and tell you the bad news, you are over budget and behind schedule. This is not sustainable, and it is not good. We wanted to stand out from that crowd and be different.
This core value commitment drives the way we do business. While we often find ourselves in extended engagements with our clients, our contracts aren’t long-term commitments. Instead, we break major objectives into value deliveries that we can execute within our two-week sprint window. Every sprint, we set our objectives ensuring our priorities are aligned to you the client. We checkup halfway through the sprint on where we are and identify anything in the way that might stop us from delivering. At the end of the sprint, we report on what got done, what didn’t, and discuss plans for the next sprint. Each sprint meeting is organized to communicate to our clients the progress that has been made.
Have you ever had an initiative or a goal that you set out to conquer, but by the end, you were wishing you had known not to go forward?
Continuous Visible Progress is a core value that permeates my personal life, and I’m better for it. I still am in love with the five-year-fixer-upper, even though every six months something new has gone wrong. First it was that we couldn’t get the electric company to connect to it, then it was that the septic tank was missing (yeah, you read that right), then it was that all the interior walls were moldy. Even this month, we discovered that the south foundation has some terrible settling, and the back of the house is slopping. It feels like it never ends, and yet, at the same time I can point to what progress has been made on the house this month. I can point to the progress that has been made each month this year. But then I look at what has gotten done, I see the vision of where I will end up materializing, and I am still not losing hope in this project of mine, because I can feel the progress.
I am still not losing hope because I can feel the progress
Thanks for reading along as we share more of what makes us tick. If you want to learn more about how we can help your team begin to realize Continuous Visible Progress, don’t hesitate to reach out.