Day 80— Productivity series 7/7: “Managing Progress”
Having a productive day brings us joy, the joy of accomplishment and cleaning up tasks from the laundry list. The tricky part is, sometimes getting things done doesn’t guarantee that we’re making progress. How so? Have you heard of the saying “one step forward, two step back”? What if we worked hard, but not working on the right direction? How do we make sure our effort don’t go in waste?
In today’s article, I’ll introduce ideas of managing progress by breaking it down to the following topics:
- Common Pitfalls in Managing Progress
- Managing Progress with Criteria
- Managing Progress with Roadmap
- Managing Progress with Checkpoints
Common Pitfalls in Managing Progress
Determine Progress
Personally, I’m not a huge fan of “working smart instead of working hard”, simply because almost all the successful people I’ve seen are working both smart AND hard; unfortunately some of the people I met who advocate for “working smart” tend to slack and generally perform under par. However, there is value in working smart, which is being strategic about generating meaningful progress instead of blindly putting effort into it.
So, let’s talk about the concept of “working smart”. How do we determine a good progress? By who’s standard, and how to measure it? A simple way to think about it, is to use Google Map (or any other navigation app) as an analogy: If the “agreed goal” is to move from Point A to Point B, then it’s not so hard to manage the progress: how much did we move? Where are we now related to our starting point and end point? More importantly, was it on the right track that helps us get closer? Or we moved on the wrong direction? Are we on the right speed?
By asking these questions as a team, and get stakeholder’s perspective, it’s not too hard to manage progress. One of the common pitfalls is that each individual has an gauge in their mind, but they forgot to align with others. Therefore we all thought we “work smart”, turned out it’s not really that smart once we talked to stakeholders or teams.
Lack of Vision
Typically, a common challenge we’ve seen in managing progress is that there’s no clearly defined End Goal (“Point B”in the Google Map analogy). Does the team has a clear vision of what success looks like? Did we visualize the vision in a way that everybody agreed to? Did we breakdown the vision into smaller chunks so we can tackle them one by one? How many of these chunks have we accomplished? The idea is to constantly measure where we are comparing to where we want to be; if it’s not super clear where we are heading, then all the effort we put in is debatable in terms of making real progress.
Unclear Starting Point
Another challenge we found in managing progress in productivity is that sometimes there’s lack of understanding of the current state (“Point A”in the Google Map analogy). Even if we have a clear, agreed end goal or vision, sometimes we found the team or individuals don’t have a clear view of the starting point. As a result, teams created an unrealistic effort estimate due to not knowing the correct current state, and it leads to more required effort to remediate those loss.
Roadblock
Another common mistake is that, sometimes teams start a project without knowing those existing hidden landmines, or blocker in the ecosystem, legal & compliance requirement, etc. These types of issue can create drastic change in effort estimation, and the promised roadmap is hard to be achieve without knowing the challenges down the road.
Managing Progress with Criteria
Definition of Done (DoD)
In order to get a clear understanding of what has been accomplished, we’ll need a good Definition of Done (DoD). In software development world, Definition of Done (DoD) is one of the most important elements when it comes to tracking progress. Although differen teams have different definitions, the important part is to have the team to discuss and all agree on one standard, so that progress can be actually made.
In creative world, because design quality is highly subjective, it’s not easy to settle for a single standard. A designer might invest lots of time to craft a logo to perfection, but if the client doesn’t like it, most of the time the designer has to go back to redo it. However, that’s not saying there’s no quantifiable way to configure the DoD. For example, a creative contract can specify that there will be 10–15 pages of wireframe document delivered; client can provide 3 rounds of feedback, and designers will be responsible to address those 3 rounds with new idea in updated deliverables; and the total time of those 3 rounds is limited to one-month period.
Managing Progress with Roadmap
Back to the idea of productivity, being productive should be making good progress in an efficient way. By comparing the what’s achieved to the roadmap, we can have a clearer on understanding of how much progress were actually made. For example, if a designer created 30 logo concepts for a project within 5 days, should we consider that productive? It’s definitely is fast, and perhaps the quality is good, too. However, if logo design is just only a small piece of the whole project, maybe the designer should’ve only spent 2 days for it, instead of taking 5 full days.
That being said, when we’re trying to be productive, it’s important to have a roadmap to understand what’s the “budgeted time” for a specific task, and enhance the efficiency within that boundary.
Managing Progress with Checkpoints
Another important factor is alignment. Take the logo design example from above; imagine the designer did the right thing, only spent 1 day on logo design according to the roadmap, also the quality is good. However, the design is based on a false direction when she did the design work, therefore the result was not really what the client‘s looking for.
If without a checkpoint to spot the misalignment on design direction, what could happen is the designer then take the wrong logo, without knowing it’s wrong, applied it on the business card design, product packaging design, poster and flyer design, and the whole design language of every deliverables were based on that wrong direction. A month passed, the designer was excited to show everything she worked on to review with the client. When the client saw everything, both the client and the designer were surprised. The client was surprised that the direction was wrong and nothing suited his need after a month of waiting; the designer was surprised because she put in all these effort and the client didn’t really appreciate it.
What could have saved all this was if the designer has showed client the logo design and got confirmation before she applied it on everything else. Client might have suggested a different direction on the logo design, and the risk of wasting time on working upon incorrect direction could have been solved.
Setting up Checkpoints
Assumption is dangerous, especially in a big project or there’s lots of dependencies. What’s the solution? Setup frequent and meaningful checkpoint to align the direction. There are 3 aspects in setting up checkpoints in the right frequency:
- Risk & Dependencies: Is future success highly depend on the decision we’re making? How confident are we with the decision we’re making?
- Confidence: What’s a good cadence to keep everyone confident about the progress we’re making? Should we manage it through face-to-face meeting, or emailing deliverables and progress report is sufficient?
- Relationship: Is there any important relationship we need to maintain through meeting to exchange thoughts, manage expectation, and attain transparency on project update?
Related reading
Conclusion
- Being productive means making meaningful progress efficiently. Managing progress in a smart way helps us stay on the right track.
- The common pitfalls when managing progress are unclear starting point, end point, roadblock, and unclear Definition of Done (DoD).
- In order to ensure our progress is on the right track, a clear roadmap with frequent check-ins allow us to examine WWW: what went well and what went wrong.
How do you track progress for your productivity? I’m eager to learn from you.
ABC. Always be clappin’.
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The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author. They do not represent current or previous client or employer views.
