I remember when I moved into my last house (I\u2019m in a condo now, it\u2019s what happens when you move to the Bay Area, a house becomes an apartment). We moved in and my wife had in her mind that she wanted butter yellow walls. She had a very specific \u201cbutter\u201d in mid \u2013 not the dark color associated with butter that has been sitting out for a while and is room temperature, but the butter that has just come out of the freezer, and is quite light in color. So I went on my merry way to the local paint store and bought the color called \u201cbutter,\u201d went home and proceeded to paint a room with it. \u201cJANE!!\u201d ((Name made up, for Jane Doe\u201d)) I called as my senses were assaulted with a richly glowing room the color of maize. So we proceeded to go back to the paint store and get a lighter yellow. This pattern proceeded for what would eventually be five rounds before we got it right (and yes, our house had 5 different shades of yellow since I was rather unwilling to repaint the whole house). <\/p>\n
Sometimes you just don’t know what you want until you see it. This actually drives me crazy. When I plan a project, I actually start with the end state in mind. I\u2019ll usually design what the final report looks like and go backwards from there, even though I have no idea what the content in that report will actually be. What I do know is what data I need to run and how I\u2019m going to go about analyzing it. I might have an idea what the data will tell me, but the discovery process is always fun as I\u2019m often surprised. The point is that I actually start with an empty shell and tell myself what data I need and how I\u2019m going to slice and dice it.<\/p>\n
It drives me absolutely crazy when people have no idea what it is that they want. A project sponsor might know they want a business case, but once they have it, they decide that they didn\u2019t want qualitative, they wanted quantitative, and then they wanted hard dollars only, not soft, and then they wanted 7 years out, not 5, and then they realized that they wanted qualitative after all.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not just consultants that get in a never ending grind with projects that won\u2019t end, but many companies have internal teams that suffer from sufficient visioning from their sponsors as well. Part of initiating a project should actually be a pretty precise definition of what the outcomes are and what the output requirements should be. We generally all spend too much time doing and too little time preparing whether it\u2019s a project or an implementation, and much energy is wasted on going back to the paint store when the first trip (ok, perhaps the second) should have sufficed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I remember when I moved into my last house (I\u2019m in a condo now, it\u2019s what happens when you move to the Bay Area, a house becomes an apartment). We moved in and my wife had in her mind that…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1667,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[47,8],"tags":[221,222,219,220],"class_list":["post-1642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-governance","category-strategies","tag-business-case","tag-outcomes","tag-project-management","tag-yellow"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1642"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1642\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1653,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1642\/revisions\/1653"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1667"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}