Project Ownership & Getting Things Done

It’s amazing how quickly a good project can be ruined.  The collective might be wiser as a whole but the decision making process is killed and real focus on projects can quickly be lost unless there is any unanimous decision making.

When a project is not business critical, decision making most certainly doesn’t need to go to the top of the corporate tree, and focusing energy on it when minds should be elsewhere is not efficient and a waste of resources.  The result of too many minds focused is that nothing gets done. Roles within a company are defined for a reason and allowing the PR person to take decisions on PR that involve time and to a lesser extent budget, and to let the IT team take system decisions that do not have a fundamental impact on operations or again on budget makes sense.

Plenty of horror stories spring to mind, from the web developer friend who had a 150 page design policy manual thrown at him and then waste 2 months going through 8 different designs for a corporate site, only for the steering committee to pick a design, defer it to the head of the company and for the CEO to decide he wants the initial design. Setting up a marketing blog could be another good example, beyond the initial acceptance of the idea and moving forward on it, the rest of the in-and-outs of the design should be decided upon by the best stakeholders as defined by their roles within the company.  The worst thing about web sites is that because everyone uses the web, everyone thinks they are gurus in the ways of design, UI, UX and everything else, when really they are not and shouldn’t be involved in the core process of design, development and deployment. Throw time sensitivity into the mix and there is even less reason for a long drawn out and involved process with multiple bodies.

Sometimes doing is more important than planning and the polish can be brought out at a later stage in the process.  It’s like developing an application, rather than planning ahead to cover functionality that could be included in phase 2-3-4-5 it’s best to get the first iteration out the door, working and then build on it, and an overly belaboured planning processes simply stymies actually achieving your goals.