No Exit

Beware of one-way projects.

A one-way project is a project that operates in this way: the tasks on which the team works are the only tasks discussed. Tasks show up in “to-do” lists, and the team works on them without question or additional input. When questions like “should these tasks be performed in a particular order?” show up, phrases like “it doesn’t matter, it all has to get done anyway” are the answer.

A one-way project has no options — no other paths that could have been taken. A golden road has been laid out, and it must be followed.

However, such projects are still under pressures. The hard realities of time and cost cannot be wished away. And so, as the path cannot be negotiated, something else must give. And thus the only option is to find ways to do tasks faster, or cheaper.

Now, truly making tasks faster (or cheaper) is hard work, and frequently includes paying up-front additional costs in exchange for down-the-road benefits. Unfortunately, doing such work looks irregular when marching down the golden path. Attempting to fold these optimizations into the plan produces resistance — if the work is treated as “new tasks”, then the team has veered from the golden road, and must be punished. If the work is folded into existing tasks, then those tasks look conspicuously large.

The enforcer on the golden road knows how her bread is buttered. She is not authorized to allow deviation from the path, and so she rewards those who perform tasks quickly, and merely sufficiently. Explanations as to why things take longer then she expects are suspicious dissembling. She considers team members who perform fast the experts, and those who perform slowly unimpressive, even if the rest of the team respects them.

This predisposition leads enforcers to value short-term speed over long-term speed. The path is clear, and going faster is merely a matter of working harder.

A one-way project has utterly surrendered decision-making to outside sources. The tasks? Of course, the path is known. The scope? Quite fixed. The price? Almost certainly fixed. Every point of articulation is slightly out of frame. Each choice made by some unnamed force. It is not for you to know why, it is for you to do.

In a one-way project, there is no project management, there is only staff management. The project is immutable. The staff? Less so.

Choice can be terrifying. The golden road has tremendous appeal — it is fire-and-forget. Both the unseen financier and the project team avoid time-consuming clarification and consideration. Every choice suggested must be contextualized, after all. Otherwise, the implications of the choice may be unnoticed. And then, the responsibility for those implications no longer falls on the party making the choice, but on the party who did not share information about the ramifications.

On the golden road, that responsibility is isolated to the point that it is not clear which party made the choice at all, merely that it stands, and must be respected. Responsibility atomized, and spread on the winds as dust.

It should be no surprise then that teams following the golden road have a term describing their day-to-day life.

A team, saddled with a one-way project, follows the golden road on a death-march.

Originally published at http://robertfmurdock.github.io on June 29, 2020. Image from pixabay.