What is the status of your projects when you are back on track at work again? Did you find it easy to recap the latest achievements? Are everybody fully up and running? Or maybe you had to have several catch-up meetings to recover where you are and what you have achieved and even more common - some of the decisions from May and June might be revised or reversed!
To lead and manage projects is a profession! And not an easy one. So you have to be on your toes and let new thoughts into your brain each and every day! Your role is to manage change so of course you need to know a lot about what is going on. You are not the one to talk about “the good old days”. It is quite easy to administrate project tools, fill in the necessary parts, send out the material and even make a summary and a presentation. The challenge is to keep the project moving in the right direction at the right pace and be able to have enough documentation so people read it and at the same time keep track on why different decisions were made so they are not questioned again, and again, and again delaying the project.
The single most important factor in a project is to not over analyze! Do you agree?
If you agree you are definitely on the right track. You dare to admit that you might spend too much time on the analysis which has a negative impact on the solution and the implementation.
If you don’t agree you are still in denial! You don’t admit that you don’t dare to skip details and trust that you will take care of them in the later phases. I promise you that even with less time spent on the analysis the important details will come up - they always do - trust me!
I have over and over again seen that the greatest project risk is that you don’t spend enough time to describe the solution, theoretically test the solution (this is when the details you might have missed come up), design and implement. You never get enough time and resources to do everything you want so in each step of the way you have to prioritize! And hand on heart - don’t you always have too little time for everything? Do you often hear people telling you they have too much time for work or private projects? if you know someone of that unique sort - please let me meet that person! After having interviewed him or her I will write a couple of good blogs or even a book about effective time management.
Shortcut to success:
Don’t over analyze!
Dare to trust that the most important details will be handled even if you don’t document each and every one of them.
It’s better to write 5 pages that will be read that 50 very detailed pages that no-one will read!!
