Shipulski On Design

Before you decide which project to start, decide which project you’ll stop.

The best way to stop a project is to finish it.  The next best way is to move the resources to a more important project.

If you find yourself starting before finishing, stop starting and start finishing.

People’s output is finite. Adding a project that violates their human capacity will not result in more completed projects but will cause your best people to leave.

If people’s calendars are full, the only way to start something new is to stop something old.

If you start more projects than you finish, you’re stopping projects before they’re finished.  You’re probably not stopping them in an official way, rather, you’re letting them wither and die a slow death.  But you’re definitely stopping them.

When you start more projects than you finish, the number of active projects increases.  And without a corresponding increase in resources, fewer projects are completed.

The best way to reduce the number of projects you finish is to start new projects.

Make a list of the projects that you stopped over the last year.  Is it a short list?

Make a list of projects that are understaffed and under-resourced yet still running in the background.  Is that list longer?

A rule to live by: If a project is understaffed, staff it or stop it.

If you can’t do that, reduce the scope to fit the resources or stop it.

Would you prefer to complete one project at a time or do three simultaneously and complete none?

When it comes to stopping projects, it’s stopped or it isn’t.  There’s no partial credit for talking about stopping a project.

If you want to learn if a project is worthy of more resources, stop the project.  If the needed resources flow to the project, the project is worthy.  If not, at least you stopped a project that shouldn’t have been started.

People don’t like working on projects where the work content is greater than the resources to do the work.  These projects are a major source of burnout.

If you know you have too many projects, everyone else knows it too.  Stop the weakest projects or your credibility will suffer.

“Circus Renz Berlin, Holland 2011” by dirkjanranzijn is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.

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