Thursday, October 30, 2014

Patience, Projects & Productivity


How patient are you when immersed in the challenge of a high priority assignment with an urgent deadline? If you’ve ever been part of a project development team, you are well acquainted with some version of the following interconnected stages of the project cycle.

1.      Generation of focused vision and goals

2.      Detail project scope

3.      Estimate resources – financial and human

4.      Map out strategic plan

5.      Execute tactics

6.      Review, assess and adjust

You know the importance of having a clear, focused and realistically challenging plan that includes detailed aspects of essential elements, a viable budget, a strategic plan with accountabilities, a timeline with execution deadlines, a means to review/assess progress and a system of incorporating project adjustment strategies.

Although each fundamental stage is critical for success, those requiring the most patience are stages one and six. Many projects ultimately fail to produce desired and needed results due to a lack of focused and clearly detailed goals. If you don’t know what success will look like then it’s easy to fall into what I refer to as “hamster wheel syndrome,” the illusion of forward momentum. If you do not include a dedicated review, assessment and adjustment stage, your team may be executing tactics that are no longer effective for a changing economic and organizational landscape; the result when this occurs is that precious resources – financial and human – are unproductively utilized and depleted.

The attribute of patience is critical for generating a clear, realistic and ambitious set of project goals, a viable strategy and optimal resources for desired results. Patience requires structuring regular time to evaluate project relevance, focus, team engagement/motivation and adherence to critical tracking deadlines. Patience can be challenging when your project team is pressured to produce immediate results. I propose that when your team is intensely feeling the pressure to speed up, that is precisely the key time to step back, review, assess, and adjust the project vision, goals and process; utilizing patience at this time helps ensure the project remains cohesive, relevant and on track. Where could embodying the quality of patience empower you and your team to slow down in service of facilitating optimal results?

Janet

For related posts, check out the following links:

Thinking Small for Big Results


1 comment:

  1. You have such an interesting blog. Thanks for sharing, I enjoyed reading your posts. All the best for your future blogging journey.

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