- Do you manage your own time well?
- Do you manage another’s performance successfully?
- Do you finish projects or is the last 10% a struggle?
- Is there just too much going on to maintain your focus?
Commitment and Confidence
With demands from so many different directions, it may seem impossible to stay a course of action and finish anything. New projects, different priorities and demanding individuals may continually pull you in new directions.
Create the Plan
Typically, even the most organized people fail to plan when they are overwhelmed with the amount they must do. However, if you invest the time to plan, two important things happen.
- You test against reality. The target date is three weeks from now. In order to make that happen, we break the project into bite-size steps. We determine that in order to meet our deadline, we need to complete three steps of the process each week. Each step takes 10 hours. Given our other commitments, we test whether or not we do or do not see time to schedule 30 hours each week for this project. When scheduling the three 10-hour steps, take into account the typical interruptions, emergencies and schedule changes that routinely happen. Do not ignore your history, or expect history to not repeat itself unless you’ve made significant changes of some sort.
- Test your “If…then’s.” Look at the people involved in the process, the obstacles you expect, the variables that are most ambiguous, and the probable outcomes at each step of the process. For example, every time you interact with Bradley, he gives you the information you need, but then thinks about it for a few days, and comes back to you with additional valuable and correct data that is important and must be considered. You know this will take him two or three days from the date of the original conversation. So, plan for it in the schedule. “If Bradley is involved, thenhis input will arrive over three days time.”There may be multiple “If…then’s” in each step of the process. When you know they may or will occur, take them into consideration both in your planning and in your reality checks.
Commit to the Plan
When obstacles come into the picture, don’t be surprised; have a course of action discussed by your project team ahead of time, “When [obstacle] occurs, we will [course of action].” You cannot think of everything, but you can think of a lot of the problems that reoccur. A majority of issues that occur in any company have occurred at a point in the past in one form or another. Pay attention to those patterns, plan for them, and commit to moving through them, staying focused on the plan to which you have committed.
Confidence
The main obstacle to getting things done is often not the processes, obstacles or situational factors. It is the way the people react to what happens. Confidence is not an egotistical reaction that ignores reality. It is a determination and perseverance that we can and we will get it done. It is not a conversation of if we can, but how we will. There are plenty of excuses why things do not get done, do not get done completely or do not get done to the level of quality they could have. The fact is that most of us, given our workload, will accept one of those excuses and let a project stop short of its potential.
What are you working on right now that you are ready to give up on?
For what project do you need to create a plan?