Hard Project Times

One of the hardest times on a project is the gap between the major activities of the project phases.

As the current phrase winds-down, team motivation isn’t as high as it was during the heavy portions of work. As the process is being worked-through, fixes and/or changes are reported and those are not as interesting to work-through as it was to initially develop the system.

Even with the best planning, team members are often not quite as busy as they were during the center of the project phase, and the adjustment to working somewhat less is not as easy as one would think. In some ways, the stress and the high adrenaline of the middle of a project phase are somewhat addictive and, while team members might sigh in relief when that part is done, it sometimes doesn’t feel quite as good as they thought it would.

Some key tips are these:

• Plan ahead. While this might seem like a time to relax, it’s also a time to regroup and prepare for the next onslaught of work.
• Spread the work out. Make sure work is divided among team members as evenly as possible, although it will never be possible to make everyone’s workload entirely even considering that there will be certain parts of the team with more responsibility during this period than others.
• Motivation and team building. While many of us sneer at concepts such as “team building” as being corny, it’s actually a valuable tool in keeping the team chugging along. Early in a project, when there’s a lot of excitement, it’s easy to plan to do a lot of team things, to be motivated, and to have high spirits. This is the hardest time to keep the team spirits up, I find, and the most important to find ways to keep the team’s energy from entirely dropping out. I’m not suggesting those elaborate team-building exercises during this period, just something fun or interesting to keep them focused on working together as a team.

Gloria Metrick
GeoMetrick Enterprises
http://www.GeoMetrick.com/