It’s a typical situation when after weeks or months of working on a project energy is systematically drained from a project team. The first enthusiasm is forgotten long time ago. The most creative design stage is already a history. Everyday work is now tracking down unrepeatable bugs or trying to arrange reconfiguration of customer’s systems to give you at least a chance to run the whole thing before deadlines. This is the moment when usually slips appear and somehow almost no one is surprised. Standard risk management techniques are used, project is moving slowly towards more or less successful final.
And then something happens. A project manager gets serious illness. A lead developer starts planned-since-the-last-year holidays. Almost all forces are thrown into a new, super-important contract which has just been signed. The issue forces you to rearrange the project team, find replacements for some positions. And to everyone’s surprise things start moving faster. Life is brought back again.
I’ve seen that so many times. CEO who approached the final stage of the project and helped to negotiate the terms of the final acceptance with the customer. CTO who had to take over sale process and led it to the end on the double speed. Project manager who replaced a colleague for ten days and moved through a couple of milestones which couldn’t have been achieved for weeks. Senior program manager who pushed R&D project from “doomed to failure” to “we’re the heroes” status when worked instead of the R&D leader for a couple of days. The list could be much longer.
Why is it so? Why the new member of the team, who definitely isn’t as familiar with all the details as the rest of the people, can become a locomotive of the group and fasten the project?
• Because the new person brings a new energy and enthusiasm to the group which is more or less tired with their work done for fifth consecutive month by now.
• She usually throws all of herself to the task to cover initial lack of knowledge about the project details. This inspires the rest of the team. Hey, should the new gal be the best of us?
• Fresh blood is injected into the project organism. Now someone looks at things from a different perspective and refreshes everyone’s point of view.
It usually has nothing to do about bringing more knowledge to the project team. 9 times out of 10 teams, during final stages of the project, team doesn’t lack knowledge. They lack energy and enthusiasm and falling into traps of monotony and tiredness. And, lucky for us, it’s usually easier to bring energy to the project instead of bringing more knowledge.
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