Part 1: Welcome to the Project#
I’ve been reading The Iliad.
I’m partway through it now, and honestly, it’s been a mission.
It’s been sitting on my “I really should read that someday” list for years, and I finally made it a priority.
I’m just going to state the obvious here:
I am not a Homer scholar.
I’m a project manager.
Which means that somewhere during the reading, my brain started doing what it always does when I encounter something unfamiliar:
What are the similar aspects here?
And unfortunately for everyone involved, I started looking at the Trojan War like a project.
Now I can’t stop.
So this is apparently going to be a series.
Welcome to Year Ten#
When I started The Iliad, I had absolutely no idea what was going on.
I didn’t grow up on the ancient Greek stories. I knew Zeus. I knew the names of a couple of the other gods. I’d even tried watching the movie Troy years ago and only made it about halfway through because, at the time, it made absolutely no sense to me.
Now I’ve started reading The Iliad and realised I’d basically been dropped into a project ten years into delivery.
Of course I had no idea what was going on.
Everyone else already has context.
There are kings, warriors, gods, alliances, grudges, families and relationships everywhere.
People have history with each other that I don’t know about.
The gods have history with each other that I definitely don’t know about.
Everyone already seems to know why we’re here.
And we’re all living on a beach.
I had questions.
What is this project actually about?
Why are we here?
What have we already done?
What was the original objective?
Is that still the objective?
What resources do we have?
Who’s actually making the decisions?
Who are all these stakeholders?
Does this project have a plan?
Why are we on a beach?
And somewhere in all of that confusion, I realised:
Oh. I know this feeling.
I’ve been dropped into a messy project that’s already well underway.
Everybody else already has the context#
There’s a particular kind of confusion that comes with joining an established project.
Everyone who’s been there for a while knows why things are the way they are.
They know the history.
They know which decisions have already been made.
They know who technically owns something and who actually makes the decision.
They know which workaround exists because of something that happened six months ago.
They know which two stakeholders have history.
You don’t.
So before I can start making sense of a messy project, I usually need to build myself a mental model.
Where are we now?
How did we get here?
Who are the people involved?
What does each of them want?
What depends on what?
What am I missing?
It turns out this is also how my brain decided to read Homer.
I wasn’t analysing The Iliad.
I was trying to orient myself inside it.
And slowly, as the people and relationships started making more sense, the giant cloud of WHO IS EVERYONE? started turning into something resembling a system.
Which meant my brain was finally free to ask the next annoying project-management question:
Why are we still doing this?
Is the project still viable?#
One of the things I like about modern project-management frameworks is the idea that approving a project once doesn’t mean you should keep doing it forever.
PRINCE2 calls this continued business justification.
Essentially, throughout a project, you keep checking whether it still makes sense to continue.
Is it still worthwhile?
Is it still viable?
Is it still achievable?
Have the circumstances changed?
Does the original justification still hold?
If it doesn’t, the answer isn’t necessarily to keep going because we’ve already come this far. The project may need to change or stop.
Which is an extremely entertaining concept to have rattling around in your head while reading about a war entering its tenth year.
I am absolutely not qualified to assess the business case for the Trojan War.
I’m still trying to remember everyone’s names.
But I do want to ask:
What are we trying to achieve now?
Is it the same thing we were trying to achieve when this started?
What does done look like?
And how did we get all the way to Year Ten?
Because by the time The Iliad begins, there is quite a lot going on.
We’ve got major stakeholder disagreements.
One particularly important resource is extremely unhappy.
There are some interesting questions about who actually holds authority.
And governance is heavily involved, except governance consists partly of gods who don’t necessarily agree with each other.
I have thoughts.
But those are problems for another article.
For now, I’m still getting my head around the project.
Current status: Year Ten
Original objective: We should probably check
Continued business justification: I have questions
Stakeholder alignment: We’ll get to that
Governance: Complicated by gods
Welcome to the project.
Originally published on LinkedIn.