It should be fun (How students should run projects — Part 1)
This is the first in a series of articles that aim to provide college and university students with the knowledge and tools necessary to successfully run school projects. No boring theory or extensive models, just a no-nonsense guide how to not suck at student projects.
Why should you even learn about this?
There can be many benefits to learning how to assess, design and evaluate how your projects are structured. By learning this you will develop skills that could be useful later in your professional career. It might even help you to deliver a more professional result. There are many good rational reasons for investing in project management that in the long term perspective might make you are more attractive candidate for certain job positions.
However there is also a more simple reason for choosing to invest your time and energy into this: you will get more out of your school projects.
By applying a little thought into how these projects are run, you can greatly increase your efficiency, get a better result out of it and more importantly, the projects will be less chaotic and thus more fun!
If you are running your projects blindly now, you are wasting energy, time and most likely, you are having a lot less fun doing them!
What is a bad project?
We have all been involved bad projects. It could have been that the tasks were unrealistic to complete in the time given, could have been that it was difficult to work together with other group members. Could even have been that you felt like you had no clue where to even begin. Though there can be many reasons for why bad projects happen, they all feel the same for those involved in it: a dark cloud settles down, work becomes strenious and the presure to work even harder increases. It’s like you have digged yourself into a hole and the only way out is more digging.
“Failing to plan is planning to fail.” — Alan Lakein
Once you have completed a bad project, it feels more like you survived it rather than you succeeded with it. It doesn’t give you a sensation of accomplishment, instead you are left with questions of what-if: what if we had more time, what if he/she did/didn’t do that thing, what if we had gotten this earlier, etc.
These questions will always be there, but in a bad project these questions appear after it’s too late to do anything about it, instead of having had them answered when they still mattered.
Sometimes you get lucky and a bad project still generates good results. But the price you pay is very high. It takes a toll on all participants and burdens you with unnecessary stress. Therefore it is important to recognize and avoid bad projects.
Then, what is a good project?
A good projects is a fun project. That is a bold statement to make, but hear me out. When working on a project what matters the most is your motivation to continue working. If you avoid conflicts, feel in charge of what is going on and see that you are moving towards a goal, then the project is a lot more fun.
A good project is also a project where you explore your options and make informed decisions. This way you answer what-if questions so that they don’t come back as doubt to haunt you after the project has ended. What-if we had done this, what-if we had done that.
I believe in order to have a good project you will have to understand and accept the following statements as truth:
1) There is never enough time
You have to constantly prioritize and re-scope the tasks. The question in your minds should be: are we spending our time on doing what gives us the most value at this given moment?
2) There will always be uncertainty
In every project there are unknowns. All you can do is either try to reduce uncertainty or embrace it. When planning your project you can pick a structure that you find appropriate with the amount of uncertainty in your project.
3) You know the least in the beginning of the project
Either you start the project by setting aside time to learn more or you include incremental learning into your process.
4) Your mental space is limited
Trying to have everything in your head all the time only generates stress and friction, and makes it harder to focus on the important details. You should only keep the most important stuff in there, the rest can be written down or shared through tools.
5) Sharing information is as important as sharing tasks
When doing projects in a group it is often critical for success that the team continuously share information and ensure that everyone is working towards the same end.
6) Not choosing your project structure is leaving it to plain dumb luck
Remember not choosing is also a choice; a poor choice, but a choice nonetheless.
7) Not everything has to be done
Just because you thought of it at one point does not mean it has to be done. Focus your work on the tasks that actually deliver value to your project. Be ready to drop the least important tasks.
The Ad Hoc Method (aka winging it)
Why spent time on careful consideration, weighing pro and cons and implementing tools and methods when you can just wing it?
Also known as the Ad Hoc method, winging it is a very popular option. It can take on a more thoughtful form where you on a daily basis ask yourself the question “so, what should I do today?” and it might even appear to you as an actual method. However it is not. It is a nightmare to justify why you would run a project Ad Hoc. How will you justify how you have prioritised your time? How do you know that you spent your time on what was most important to do? How will you argue that this method was more suitable for this project than any other?
Well you can’t. All you can do is to make it personal. “It was what I though to be most important”, “This is what works best for me”, “It felt right to me”. Perhaps you might even have achived great results with this “method” before, but that begs the question: How must better could those projects have been if you have applied an methodic structure?
Don’t throw away a century of best practice and massive amounts of experiences on the assumption that it is not worth it and that you know better anyway.
In the next article I will look into how you should think about projects and how to start a succesful project from scratch.
