More Projects Delivered with Less Stress? It’s True! (Pt 1)

Prefer to watch rather than read? Click here, five minutes, with captions.

There’s so many projects on, it’s overwhelming.  Yet, when we look at the total work and the total salary budget…we should be able to get it all done!  We get the seemingly absurd situation of not being able to spend that very capital or project funding we worked so hard to get!

What’s going on here?  Luckily…it’s something quite natural…and quite simple.  And it’s also one of the key aspects of the method I call The Project Factory ™

Goes like this:

Line ‘em Up!

We’ve got three projects, Blue, Red and Green.  All equal value.  All due the same time.  All break down into four parts, each part takes one month.  This isn’t a trick, they’re all equal.

And here’s the kicker – you can only work on one project at a time.  Which means each month you can only work on one part of one of the projects. So the whole thing is going to take us 12 months (just take this as a given).

So, here’s the question I pose in my workshops – if we start gaining benefits the month after a project completes, how will you sequence this work in order to maximise the total benefit?

And to help, look at this way – the benefits we get after a project is completed is 10,000 per month.  Call it dollars, call it community or client benefit…the point is…it’s why we’re doing it.

So…how do you line ‘em up?

If you’re like most people in the world, who want to do a decent job, show that you can handle a fair workload, and want to hit the ground running, if we go from January to December, you’re most likely to line up your work like this.

Busy-busy, we’re going flat out, and at the end of the 12 months, they’re all done.

But Wait…

Or….we can organise them like this (remember, we are talking about the principle here):

While the second way isn’t a stranger, what many of us aren’t aware of is the difference the second way makes in terms of benefits collected.

The Difference Does Make a Difference

Let’s do the maths for each method, applying the parameters from above in term of benefits of 10,000 per month once the project is complete. Putting them alongside each other:

The dots in the above show the months in which we’ve been collecting benefits (because it was completed). So each dot means 10,000 of benefit. 

Now count the dots.  Top way….3 dots for 30,000 benefit.  Bottom way….12 for 12,000!  Four times the benefit delivered after 12 months!

But don’t also miss this – Green finished at the same time in both ways of doing it!  Focusing on Blue, then Red, then Green, does not delay the finishing time of Green.  Except we get four times the benefit, and Blue and Red are much happier customers.

And now consider that the above is just three projects.  Throw in the more realistic 20+ you’ve got going on and you can see why we are both busy…yet nothing gets done.  Believe it or not, we actually set it up this way –  get our your ‘business plan’….what’s the due date of every project?  Is there anything in there about which one will be done first?

There’s More!

• The bottom way of organising gets us towards what I call ‘relaxed focus’.  Less harried.  What’s interesting is research where they have made people work one way or the other – people reported feeling more useful and productive in the top way of doing thing…. whereas the bottom way showed the evidence that a lot more got done!  (This is reflective of our cultural norms about what ‘hard work’ looks like, very much exacerbated by our interconnected, device-driven, constant-demand world)
• The top way of working creates significant delay and periods of inaction from the customer point of view – “why haven’t the builders shown up to do the next part” syndrome.  It’s not because the builders were lazy, they were over on other jobs.  Disappointed customers ring in and email…this adds further delay…and the top line extends way to the right.
• Look at the number of changes from one project to another.  The time, effort and crucially the mental delay required to refocus are all called ‘switching costs’.  The top way of working sees a total of 11 switches, the bottom 2.  On an individual level, some studies show it can take 20 minutes to get back to a previous level of focus.  One a bigger scale, it’s re-engaging the people, fitting in the meetings around all the other stuff…we just lose the thread and turn projects into zombies.
• The bottom way of working gives us a win every four months.  The top way….we have to wait until toward the end of the year before we can say “we’ve done something”.  Us humans need to know we’re making progress, and actually finishing something…that’s real progress on the year’s work.
• And if all are due at the end of the year…it doesn’t matter which one you start first.  And if any of them are due one day earlier than another…then do that one first!

Bringing it Home

I know what you’re thinking – “great, but that’s not how the real world works”. 

I know – I live in it too.  Which is why there’s a Part II to this article coming soon…I’ll go through some practicalities. But don’t wait for that…

This is not ‘the rules’.  But this is a crucial principle of getting work done. It applies to your own tasks as an individual, to teams, to units and to whole organisations.  The simple effort to know the thing that we are shipping next, and the ability to focus on that until it is finished makes a huge difference.

Remember, customers don’t really care whether you’ve started things.  They want to know when you’ll be finishing them.  And your people also want to finish things…because it’s great to feel useful.

So do this for now – pick an initiative, declare it ‘the Blue project’….convene everyone involved tomorrow and declare ‘no work on any other projects until this one is shipped out of our show’.

You’ll be amazed how good it feels to get something shipped. 

Now, over to you.