Project Management in Action, not Motion
Delivering complex digital assets isn’t difficult if you know where to focus your team.
For many department leads, producing a website or app (or overhauling an existing asset) can feel like facing Goliath. With the right strategy, though, it’s possible to shift your mindset to a project management system that’s immediately rewarding.
Whether you’re a CEO, project manager, team leader, or engineer, it’s often easy to feel like you are outside the realm of your expertise when planning technical projects, and it’s possible you are. These things require teams of people to get right, each with their own specialty. Before you know it, you’re a hardhat-clad contractor organizing the construction of what feels like something beyond a skyscraper. In front of you, ideas and chicken-scratch blueprints for a daunting behemoth that stretches beyond the clouds, beyond the atmosphere, and into an infinite, inky vacuum—a spacescraper, if you will.
You don’t have to be a mastermind engineer to construct spacescrapers. We’ve all faced tasks that seem insurmountable. Up until this point we’ve likely developed methods of our own to start chipping away the boulders before us, yet I still see many spinning their wheels and struggling with the stress of large tasks every day. These battles don’t just make for grueling journeys, they usually prevent the journey in the first place because focus is concentrated on motions directed at the final outcome instead of action that results in measurable progress.
In Atomic Habits, author James Clear defines his view on the difference between motion and action:
“When you’re in motion, you’re planning and strategizing and learning. Those are all good things, but they don’t produce a result.
Action, on the other hand, is the type of behavior that will deliver an outcome. If I outline twenty ideas for articles I want to write, that’s motion. If I actually sit down and write an article, that’s action.”
Remove obstacles and barriers to entry by streamlining motion and making room for more action. Going through the motion is important, but it can be mistaken for progress. It’s merely a minor prerequisite. It’s buying the book and showing up to class, but it’s not doing the work that shows progress.
If we want to accomplish large tasks, like building spacescrapers, we must make room for energy that can be put toward producing results, not planning results. After all, this is a digital space. If we want to start with brick and swap it out for glass later, we can, but we can’t apply new knowledge without laying that first brick.
But what about the importance of planning and having a solid foundation? Of course the value of having a plan and a solid foundation is indisputable, but we can be smarter about this process. Timebox your intentions in motion. Make them efficient and avoid spiraling into hypotheticals. These motions must lead to action quickly.
Intentions in Motion vs. Action
Those trying to build a spacescraper with intentions in motion spend time talking about what they’ll be able to do with their completed masterpiece. They'll list the benefits of the achievement and the challenges over which they became victors. They’ll spend hours, hundreds of hours, molding and sculpting the pièce de résistance to frame it on a gallery wall and gain support and acknowledgment from an internal team. What-will-ultimately-be is measured in hypotheticals tainted in confirmation bias. All the while, a dirt lot remains in public space.
Meanwhile, those with intentions in action have built the first floor of their spacescraper. They don’t care what it looks like, they’re building to learn and gain further insight into where they’re headed. They’re standing on top of the first floor and getting a better view of the land and using that initial knowledge to inform the succeeding floors. Each floor informs the next and progress is measured in floors completed and insight gained immediately rather than one spacescraper completed years from now whose benefits were defined in an echo chamber.
If you want to make progress in your next technical challenge, set aside the end goal.
Start Before You're Ready
Popular YouTube content creator Sean Cannell often urges his viewers, who are themselves aspiring creators, “Start before you’re ready.” The Think Media founder and CEO embeds the phrase throughout his online videos repeatedly, as if it were a mantra (and it should be), committing it to method and cementing the idea into the foundation of any potential urge to create, whether it’s posting new content or starting a new exercise regimen.
The great can wait; don’t let perfection become a barrier to your value.
“The best is the enemy of the good.” Voltaire.
Easier Said than Done
If you’ve already been tasked with constructing that spacescraper, I can practically feel the dismay building as you read.
“Easier said than done,” you might be saying to yourself. “How can I start before I’m ready if I don’t know where to begin?”
If the starting point is unclear and you don’t know where to begin, that’s easy, because it means you don’t have enough information. If you don’t have enough information, then your starting point assumes the role of hunting and gathering more information. You’re on a mission for data.
If the goal is overcoming a particular business challenge, the data you’re looking for are informed by two queries:
- What strengths and opportunities may exist to achieve the goal?
- What threats and weaknesses are present that are keeping the orgaization from achieving the goal?
When building digital experiences, our progress is measured in small actions that generate user behavior data. This is what could be defined as a lead measure, but that’s for another day. By continually producing smaller actions, we’ll generate more data and gain more insight to inform future action.
We don’t participate in massive unveilings or pull the velvet after months of hard work. We make small, meaningful changes, frequently. Before you know it, we’re checking out the view from atop hundreds of floors of knowledge produced in action—primed for the next informed evolution.
Originally published on searchcraft.io.