new year, new me?

It's that saying "out with the old, in with the new", "The King is dead, long live the King" and other niceties. Happy New Year! Now, let's go.

The start of this new year, the new decade, coincided with a deadline for a huge project I'm involved in being moved up. When finding out about this change in schedule and delivery, there were some mapped out alternatives and suggestions of fast tracking some processes. However, what happened later could be referred to as "crashing the project".  Both of these terms are of course project management terms.

It's not really descriptive of what happens in a team with a project. To explain the terms quickly, one could say that fast tracking means working on several things in parallell rather than sequential. It increases risk, maybe especially when you develop things at the same time although the things are technically building on each other. And crashing is adding resources and increasing the cost but making the project faster.

In real world it meant that in the first part of the "let's work hard for the deadline" was developing a few things in parallell to avoid the time between "now this is complete, start with the next part". And then the second step was "stop working on any other project and go all in on this one and work OT if needed".

I would admit to thinking when I learned all these fancy terms that "increase resources" meant "hire additional people to help". I would say now that it usually means "stop working on other stuff and focus on this Project" since there's seldom a long period of time that this happens (in my place of business anyway). Needless to say, it's rare that you can "stop doing everything else" in a job, so it's a struggle balancing leaving all the other stuff for a short time vs working a little too much.

Which brings me to my point of this post. There is nothing that makes it so clear who you are as when you are faced with pressure and how you deal with this pressure is (for some of us) telling. I tend to get very focused on the task at hand (finishing the project). Depending on how much extra things that are in the background, and on the team, I tend to drop the shining smile and become a bit more blunt. As I said, focused on the tasks e.g. "We need to do A, F, G and K to finish. Let's do it!".

And while I definitely have worked on my personality expression over the years, and was raised as a very polite non-pushy person - there are limits to my patience and emotional bandwidth with people waffling and not contributing.

Lucky for me, there's a gif and a video (1-1.14 in the link) expressing how I felt when this phase happened.

"You don't know what I look like when there is a deadline that we can meet but it will require actual work and getting things done in a timely fashion".

Of course it's not quite as melodramatic. I was never in love with the project, and the project never loved me back to start with. But it is a good reminder that the last part of project is often the hardest. And that it requires something special to motivate the team and get everyone to perform great. The "actual finishing" the final things, wrapping up the present, tying the bow and writing the documentation and filing it so you can find it when you need to revisit, that takes effort. Especially when there are a plethora of other things waiting to get done and demanding your attention. And it is why it's so important to keep politeness and decency, and after the project is complete - have a "we did it!" celebration and hopefully a short relaxing time to regroup and get energy for the next thing. One can hope. Happy New Year indeed!