Done and dusted - Why projects need constraints
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Large projects often fail because they turn into shapeless monsters. You have to know early on what done will look like.
Yesterday we looked at two big lessons I learnt during our biggest project from the last 12 months. Today I’m going to share a third important take away:
3. Thou shalt know what done looks like
I still remember the day we were all gathered in a meeting room to brainstorm. It was early days for our project and there was still lots of risks and uncertainty.
After some amount of discussion and debate, I grabbed a whiteboard marker and said “Okay, how will we know if we’re done?”
This was an important moment because without boundaries you cannot have a shape. Part of why large projects fail is because they end up turning into shapeless monsters.
We jotted down in about 5 bullet points what we believed “done” would look like and stuck to that definition for dear life.
There were PLENTY of times that we were tempted to “just add this one extra thing”. Sometimes because it “just made sense”, sometimes because we knew the one more thing would anyway need to be done eventually and sometimes because of external pressure.
Adding a 6th bullet point is NOT going to only increase the time by 20%. Complexity does not correlate with effort and productivity linearly. Your budget, timeframe and quality of work will increase exponentially. So hold your ground! You can always do a phase 2.