I find that departments tend to take on problems all at once:
- We can’t change A because B depends on it
- We can’t update B because C drives it
- C isn’t even in our department, so asking D to help is out of the question
- E is based on A and since we can’t even get B to work, nothing else will work
Start your projects like you eat your food — with bites. The best advice I ever read, and I have to remind myself of daily, is how to begin tackling a project:
- Make it work
- Make it right
- Make it fast
Make it work
Remember, the reason why you’re starting the project is because you know there’s something that can be improved on, and you’re pursuing that truth. Your goal at the onset of a project is to set concrete, achievable goals. You know there’s a better way to do it. Now start building the foundation.
Maybe that means making a test database that isn’t perfectly standardized or joined perfectly. Maybe that means forgoing UX and forgoing the pretty buttons and verbiage. Good. Maybe you’re skipping a few steps in the approval process. Maybe you’re making a disgusting switch case, egregious if/then statement, and stringing together logic with nothing more than hope and bubble gum. Good.
Your goal at this stage is just to make the solution work. Why? You started out with a problem, and you know there’s a better way to do it. If you can produce that, the result, the end result that you know you can achieve, you’ve literally already achieved your goal.
Celebrate.
You need to celebrate those signposts. Don’t save celebration until the end of the project — you’ll burn out. Your employees, coworkers, and their friends, will burn out. Celebrate that you got the row to insert into the database correctly. Celebrate that you were able to resize the screen dynamically. Celebrate that you already finished what you knew was possible, and that you already reached your goal.
Make it right
Now that you literally know your goal is possible, because you just made it work, it’s time to undo all the hack workarounds you implemented in the first part.
“But I spent all that time stringing it together with hope and bubble gum, and it already works, why undo it?”
You took workarounds just to get it to work, which was fine then. Now it’s time to make it right. Fix one workaround at a time, because then you learn the structure of the data necessary to facilitate that solution. Make those changes to the databases. Fix the egregious switch statement and correct the convoluted logic.
You have something that works, now it’s time to refine it and make it something sustainable. Sure, you can leave it as-is, call it a day, and head to the pub for a beer. Then a month, months, years, down the road when you have to update or add something, remember that you did it to yourself. We’ve all been there where we get something handed down to us from a predecessor, and looked at it, and thought, “My god, what have you done?”
Don’t do that to yourself.
Make it fast
Depending on the medium you’ve chosen to embed your solution in, you have the opportunity to make it fast. Fast doesn’t necessarily just mean speed, it means more optimization. Take the time to optimize it for:
- You and your team, the developers
- Your organization
- Your users and stakeholders
We’ve all played a poorly-optimized video game (I can run DOOM on my smart fridge), we’ve all used an app on our phone that chugged while it processed the request. Your solution doesn’t have to be like that. What do you have already? What do you know already?
- You know it works
- You spent time untangling the hacks you did just to get it work
- You have a successful solution that’s done and ready-to-go-live (if not already)
Now make it better.
What did you do?
You took a mountain and broke it one pebble at a time. You identified the problem. You conceived a solution. You tested the solution. You made the solution work right away. You fixed your transgressions and made it the best experience for your users.
And you (and your team) did it. All of it. And the first step, was to just make it work.
