Things don't always go according to plan

Hi everyone –

I've never been a great planner.

Just like anyone though, I've picked things up out of necessity. After all, building an app without plans wouldn't work very well.

It feels amazing when a plan comes together. All of the details are just so. The team is pleased with the outcome. The stakeholders are happy. You give yourself that internal pat on the back of a job well done.

But what about when things don't go according to plan?

You wish the bowling bumpers would pop up and bounce you back from the gutter giving you a chance to get back on track.

It's tempting to start listening to our internal monologue of overly critical questions like..

"Why does this always happen to me?"
"Why can't I ever get it right?"
"What's wrong with me?"

It happens to all of us from time to time – give yourself a break.

The team and I have been wading through a project that has doubled the allotted time we planned to get it done – talk about not going according to plan!

What I'm learning is it's all about how you handle things when they don't go according to plan.

Ignore it? Can't do that. Face it head on? Ugh, I guess so.

My co-founder Chris often reminds the team that "reality is our friend". We knew early on that we were running out of time. Facing the reality that this project was just bigger than we anticipated is fine – it's okay!

But once you've recognized things aren't going to plan, what will you do next?

We talked about it as a team and made our best guesses as to how much more time we'd need. Then proactively set a new target date and let everyone know what was going on.

But before continuing on, we looked back and asked this question:

"If we knew at the beginning of the project it would take this long, would we have started?"

The answer was a resounding, "Yes!" We would have gone about it differently, but the project is worth the time. So we continued on by intentionally deciding to, not by letting sunk-cost pressure us into spending more time than we wanted.

It turns out our revised timelines were still too conservative, but knowing that we were committed to seeing this project through, gave us the assurance to keep trimming scope where we could while keeping the vision of the project in focus to end up with a great end-product.

If the answer to the question above was , "No, we probably wouldn't have done it if we knew it would take this long." Then we would have had to make the tough call to abandon the project if didn't have an air-tight view of what it will take to finish it a timeframe we were willing to accept.

Cheers,
– Michael

ps. The project we've been working on is all-new goals tracking tools for Uptick and we're really excited to share it with you soon 😎

Originally sent as an email to Uptick subscribers on July 20, 2021