A project has three parts
and only two of them are witnessed.
The beginning is loud.
There is a meeting, a name, a channel.
People ask what it is,
and you get to describe something
still made entirely of intention.
The end is loud.
It ships, somebody says well done,
a number appears in a slide.
Between those two
there are four months
in which nobody will ask you anything.
That stretch has no applause in it,
and it is where the work lives.
The flatness is structural.
It is not information about the project
and it is not information about you,
although it will present itself as both,
usually around week nine,
usually on a Wednesday.
Watch what happens to people in there.
Standards drift, quietly,
because there is no audience
and no moment of being seen.
Scope grows, quietly,
because adding something
is the only available way
to feel that today produced anything.
And people stop saying what they think,
because reporting trouble in month one
is information,
and reporting it in month three
sounds like an excuse being assembled early.
What works is not motivation.
It is manufacturing endings.
Something demonstrable every two weeks,
shown to a person outside the team,
even if it is ugly,
even if it is a screen recording
that nobody asked for.
The point is not the feedback.
The point is that the middle
gets a floor put under it
at regular intervals.
Write the status even when nothing changed.
Especially then.
Two sentences, honest,
containing the word stuck
if the word is stuck.
And name it out loud at the start.
Tell the team that month two and month three
will feel like nothing is happening,
that this is simply what those months feel like,
and that the feeling is not evidence.
People can tolerate almost anything
they were warned about in advance.
The beginning takes the enthusiasm.
The end takes the credit.
The middle takes the work,
and takes it in silence.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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